


Группа Крови

by Albrecht_Starkarm



Category: Black Lagoon
Genre: Character Study, Depression, Existential Crisis, F/M, Incest, Music, Philosophy, Regret, Reminiscence, Soviet-Afghan War
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-24
Updated: 2017-02-24
Packaged: 2018-09-26 16:51:46
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 22,365
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9912065
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Albrecht_Starkarm/pseuds/Albrecht_Starkarm
Summary: For old soldiers, war's cruelest moment is when it ends.When country, ideal, and even death have deserted you, the greatest hope is only to have someone to share that eternity in the mist and dark.





	

Her voice poured through the door's heavy panel. Slowly, stirring his ears, eddying in the dark spaces that were only shores to darker ones still. He was sure that he'd heard her. He slept; it was something predictable, sure, a biologic phenomenon. It was animal. Animals slept. Animals ate. Animals shit and pissed and they huddled in dark woods.

They were animals, also. Wolves. Not the lonely rangy beasts, perpetually hungry, gnawed to a sharp-edged frenzy with privation and need, but a pack. Well-fed, fur thick and sleek; jaws matted with blood. For they ate, and ate, and ate; they weren't even wolves, maybe. Wolves didn't kill like they did. Not with any ferocity he'd ever seen. Not with the _enthusiasm_. Rabid animals were nothing like they were.

His eyes slipped open, staring up at a ceiling that was his, and not at all. It wasn't even that it didn't belong to him. It just lacked that fundamental kiss of rightness. It was ineffable, and not at all. He knew what it was. The wood was heavy, lacquered with a warmth that defied the place's sticky tropical furnace. The windows had been thrown closed, and the air-conditioner was a distant throb through the building, its long wending corridors carpeted in crushed scarlet whose regal velvet nap muffled even the heaviest clomping combat boots.

Some still wore their boots. He didn't. It was like a beast peeling off its paws, but it was about appearances, wasn't it? Appearances were everything. His dress uniform, of course, had the usual boots lacquered to a shine that nothing but simple spit and toil hunched over their leather blackened to a glint like chitin could perfect. He always perfected them. Every week, his predictable rite.

As certain as the morning's rifle inspection, tearing down the Kalashnikov, Model 1974, 5.45x39mm, folding stock model that was their birthright. It was something intimate, a passionate warmth animating his hands, quick and practiced and still never with a sense of the prosaic. It was every day, yes, but not everyday. He'd begun to adore his rifle more than other soldiers in training. He was a volunteer; not a conscript.

His father had been one of Stalin's esteemed paratroops, the men who flung themselves from aeroplanes when the very _idea_ was something that was almost taboo, as surely mad as defying gravity. And they still did, with dauntless conviction. His face bore the Vyazma Operation's scars, worn with enthusiasm and pride. His mother's long fingers would drift over them, the old man's savage chiseled visage as absolutely stern and steely as the rifle that he kept as pride of place in the apartment where the superstitious and ignorant would have held religious icons, and surely did now.

He would watch them together. It was something strange, unreal, like admiring a nymph caressing a tree's gnarled heavy bark. Patiently, quietly, he and his sister would crane around the corner when his mother's eyes would darken at the table and they would understand intuitively that the big taciturn man with his huge scarred hands was desired. There _was_ a bedroom, of course, but his parents had little inkling of what others called _shame_.

What was there to be ashamed of? She was achingly beautiful. Hair like slate, grayed like something he'd only see in cartoons outside of his Motherland from the Great Patriotic War's unspoken cruelties, nothing else had aged in her forty years; a proud hawked nose and soft creamy skin and fine fingers that craved his father's cheeks, his chest. The old man wasn't _ugly_ ; oh, he understood that from the looks that were often longer than glances.

The old man was also a giant; maybe that was at least half of it, not only head-and-shoulders taller than everyone else but _vertiginous_ , a sequoia with legs that'd thickened with labor and his endless military regimen. Ryazan was something beautiful, he remembered, the air cold and often thick with smoke that blasted in acrid columns from the countless factories that were the city's leaders' pride.

More than anything, there were the fat-bodied wasplike Mil helicopters and the corpulent Antonovs and Ilyushins that trawled the skies like another age's rafts in an endless protean river, the faceless insectile figures that he'd so often seen at the controls their boatmen in diligent but never _thankless_ toil.

A print of Repin's _Burlaki_ lay across one of their apartment's creamy walls, something formative, fundamental, a forest of men stitched into the muddy banks, great iron muscles straining and thick veins splintering sun-tortured skin; their anguish was the proletariat's suffering, the despair in servitude under the lash, the Bosses' selfish hungers.

It was a vast apartment for really _any_ Soviet citizen. It was altogether too much, his father protested, but didn't protest _that_ much. They'd probably need to share _eventually_ with family when they moved from Moscow or Leningrad or maybe even Volgograd. They never did.

The old man was influential; powerful. Not with the Party, whatever his loyalties, but with the VDV. The old man was a Polkóvnik, after all, mantling up the ranks without anything more than a shrug at the pomp and uniforms; he had visitors call on him constantly, men and women, friends from the War or those with ambitions for their children with promise that shouldn't just, they assured him, languish in the Regular forces. True dutiful Soviet citizens. It was a wish that they should have the telnyashka; the sky-blue beret.

That was _his_ wish from the instant he could even hope to understand its meaning. The old man's lullabys were Airborne anthems; his mother's soft voice, husky from the hot makhorka that spilled from her lips, adored the Corps' melodies, also. He could _feel_ the pride, a palpable thing that embroidered itself into his sister's heart and his, also, when they soared with the National Anthem. Stalin may have been effaced from the land, but never from the lyrics that they admitted in those discreet moments.

And he was no longer home. For a moment, he almost was, because the room had been wrought around that ideal, but it was still _imperfect_. A phrase twisted itself through the dark places behind his black eyes; one of the few counterrevolutionary utterings he'd ever heard from the old man. From the Bible.

_A stranger in a strange land._

The old man said it about being a soldier. You belonged to absolutely no one. Cast out of your own people, driven from them by the violence that stained you, enameled itself on you, made you something fearful to those that weren't craven but at least lacked the spirit you _needed_ to be that, you sure as hell never found comfort amongst the enemy.

And now it took on another, deeper meaning for the big man whose heavily muscled body, seamed with scars and pitted with ugly valleys that almost bottomed out into shell-holes through the flesh that had never been mended, stared up at the ceiling. It wasn't an act of denial; it wasn't affirmation, either. He dwelt in a place that was neither at the extremes fashioned in the infinite and nothing; he was hedged between them.

He was alive. Many men weren't. The old man had been unsparing about that. That you would never be totally independent of those things that civilians understood only as friendships, but weren't. They tore themselves deeper; they were almost like a marriage, the old man said, insofar as their becoming a _part_ of you. Every day. A fellow soldier was not _only_ another rifle. A fellow soldier was not _only_ another uniform and pair of boots and firing arc covered.

Even those you hated were still _there_ ; still a facet of that great hard gem that was brittle enough, like any diamond, to shatter. And they'd rip a piece of that perfection from you, even if you'd been fantasizing about dragging your knife across their throats, savoring their blood's hot sting on your fingers.

He was alive. The huge man was alive, chest cradled with a telnyashka that was the largest they could dredge up for him. It was still something that didn't just whisper but _roared_ with a false vanity. It was just _barely_ enough. Muscle deformed its dreamy and demented seams, twisted across pectorals that blasted up with an almost clinical relief, a flayed anatomy dummy in splintered white fabric.

The sleeves cradled a constellation of impossible strength in its depth and its girth. It was like the Lagoon Company's black man, Dutch; they had many commonalities, he thought. What other people thought of as silence and reserve and what they understood intuitively with the quick nods and the quirking half-smiles as just being _awareness_. You stood and listened while other people talked. He was sure the black man had been a veteran non-com like he was. He knew it. There was an accord in that.

The big man stood; or that is to say, he _craned_ out of the bed, sheets tousled and twisted and smeared with the sweat that sprang from his skin without any invitation at all. There was no reason for it to be there. It still hung over him in a heavy fug. The big man didn't often smoke; his old man never smoked, either, even if his mother did. It was something almost spiritual for her. She'd cradle the coarse military cigarettes in her achingly fine fingers, and she'd stare at nothing, or grace his sister or him with the wan lean smile that twisted her lavish red lips, and she would smoke.

In the dark, when his father was away leading men on training exercises or still at the base, she'd leave the lights off, and sit. The cigarette would flare, prick up in an amber corona around her, something almost sulfurous, and its light would flood over her, capture every shape in a artful relief.

The big man could draw when he was a boy. He could now, of course, but there was never much need for it. They were private indulgences; they had little meaning to anyone. No pragmatism, anyway, and his hands were often needed for other things. But there were still the thick sketchbooks and the charcoal's coarse black shafts pleading for his attention in those few moments he called private.

He would sometimes light a cigarette, and watch it die slowly, fading in the night with the layered blackout curtains dragged closed, denying the city's restless fearful pointillism that misted everything with an ugly profane luster. It wasn't at all like Ryazan's. It was nothing like the battlefield, either. It stank, also, unlike anything he'd ever been forced to feel, been forced to _suffer_. The wet fetor of human rot; the stink of a moral necropolis whose denizens weren't embalmed, weren't entombed, weren't even burned, but tossed out to blacken and bloat and fester while they still lived.

Was he one of the living dead, also?

He must have been.

“Comrade Starshii Praporshchik, are you still asleep?” And the voice could not be ignored, of course. He knew the voice. How could he not? The word wasn't _recognized_. Do you recognize your own face in the mirror, or know it as intuitively as, well, your own face?

This was the intimacy for him. He'd stood, felt the hardwood under his bare feet. It was luxuriant, but there was no real _luxury_ for him. It was a vestment, a bivouac, and if his CO had ordered it, he would have sat on a throne, and he'd still be as stiff-backed and austere and martial as his old man settling with his wide heavy creased strength on the heavy wooden chair that he'd brought back from the Fascist Wolf's lair.

It was his _one_ act of indiscipline.

The old man had told him it was there not because he wanted to loot _something_ , but only because he couldn't find chairs big enough for him in the Soviet Union, because the carpentry shops built everything according to the bell-curve. He didn't belong on the bell-curve. Nor did the big man, either. His gait was enough to take him from the bed to the door in about a half-second.

Another instant to ready himself. He stood there in his undershirt and shorts; it wasn't exactly the rigid hard discipline she expected.

But there was another hard impatient rap at the door.

“Starshii Praporshchik, are you deliberately not listening to me, or are you not in your room?”

“I'm here, Kápitan.” The words weren't ungainly on his lips; they never had been. Russian was his language, but it hadn't held pride of places for ages. They'd gorged themselves on the foreign, on the sinuating syllables in other tongues.

Their enemies' and their allies'. He'd learned French and English in primary and secondary; specialized in languages at the Academy. He'd felt the KGB's rank breath on his neck more than once; their beasts sniffled around, slobbered over him. It was disgraceful, _disgusting_ , the way that they preened, invited him to be _something more than just a soldier_.

They called them Army _Dogs_.

The big man loved dogs. His father had owned a dog in Siberia where he'd lived with the grandfather the big man never knew; there were the few aged ferrotypes slapped on the wall, his grandfather's immense silhouette against the cold snow with the dogs in their grizzled chaotic ranks worrying at bones and heaps of meat. They were huge dogs.

Shepherd dogs; more than a few leaner wiry beasts probably only a few generations' careless breeding away from wolves were their hunting partners when they trekked through the wastes, stalked prey like the natives into the forests that brooded in their forbidding weather-eaten trunks and evergreen shadows. But the old man's tales about the dogs had mesmerized him. Their nobility, their strength, their dauntless resilience. Their loyalty; fealty unto death. That a dog had snapped its jaws when the old man lay under a rotten trunk that had wilted down and embraced him in death's cold grasp while wolves gathered around him, baleful and with hackles raised and drool twinkling on their fangs. Wolves didn't usually hurt humans unless you'd wronged them. Then they would take you if they could.

But the dog was there. Flashed its fangs; its fur stood up in a hot white crest. Its shoulders strained and its tail stabbed out and its growl was deep enough to toll out to his grandfather deeper in the woods. It was a tale that the big man had asked to hear again and again and again as a young boy, his father stark and austere in his uniform, staring down into his crèche.

_You want to hear about loyal Katya again? All right, all right, boy. I'll tell you._

The big man was a loyal dog, maybe, more than a wolf. Always at her feet.

The door groaned open. It wasn't locked; no one here ever locked their doors. It would have been a perversion, an act of some profound distrust in the discipline they'd wrought. She was beautiful. Always so beautiful. It flashed out at him. It wasn't that he'd never given any thought to it before.

How deeply _she_ was reflected in the face. Not the hair; not the body. Just the face. Maybe it narrowed only to the eyes. He was sure the Corps' head-shrinkers would've had _something_ to say about it. But to hell with them.

To hell with anyone.

“I thought you'd never answer the door, Comrade Starshii Praporshchik.” It always struck him, the careless jumble of English and Russian. But then again, there _was_ no real equivalent for what he'd been, was there? Or what he still was.

They clung to the words, the talismans, because they were the last vestiges that had any real _meaning_ in a phantasmal universe where petty and ridiculous people fought and slaughtered and died for ghostlike hungers that never quite found any purchase in reality. But that didn't mean they were any less real.

Because people bled for them.

It had come to him while he stared at a textbook in the history of Marxist-Leninist Materialistic Inevitability; the progress, the passage through years and ages, the _ineluctable_ quality in the Revolutions that would ultimately install Socialism and then Communism amongst the people. That false consciousness and class awareness would melt away.

And he tasted it.

It was so strange. But he _tasted_ it on his tongue and it was almost impossible to keep it back. Everything that people did and thought was impossible before it was real. Morons sneered at Socialism, called it wishful thinking, but it wasn't even _that_. It had been thought of, and so it was as real as anything else.

Morons had sneered at the first man with his cock swinging around in the hot sunlight who thought that maybe he should wear an animal's skin like an animal.

The first person who thought maybe that strange protean heat that poured out of hot grass and became ash _eventually_ might be something everyone could use. That there might have been some way to _make_ it, even.

The first person...

All countries.

All societies.

All _ideals_.

They all came from believing in impossible things.

He and his soldiers and more than anything his _Kápitan_ , the woman there, they were made out of impossible things, too. Their wishes and hopes and desires.

They were impossible things. They were the soldiers of a country and an ideology that, as far as everyone else was concerned, didn't even exist. They'd been worse than just cast out: It had served his beloved land many times to do terrible and cynical things. Men and women could be sacrificed for a Great Good. This, he knew. His entire life was committed to that service. They would have died with smiles on their faces under a cloudless sky in the desert or the mountains or the valleys that that suddenly blossomed in a deep cleft of forbidden green around the Hindu Kush like primeval places where people millennia ago must have believed their old gods dwelt.

That wasn't the problem. It wasn't _dying_ . It was living and dying for what their leaders had become. Unbeknownst to them, to the old man whose last words were a long rattling wheeze and a hand thrust out at his mother and a strangled _What was it all for?_ , to everyone else who'd worked and toiled and sacrificed so much, their great country was _nothing_ at all.

Fucking nothing. Somehow, for years, their leaders had been nothing but closet capitalists. When the old foundations imploded, it wasn't hard to find the rot: They'd just turned their greatcoats inside out and they came out branded with Gucci; Prada replaced Pravda and grave Red Square was ringed with McDonald's and designer clothing shops and swarmed with American blue jeans.

They'd sold them out. They'd sold their country, kicked even Alexander The Liberator off his historical throne and shoved their people back into serfdom. They toiled, _whored_ themselves for the fat American capitalists that swarmed over their country like a plague of locusts. Prostituted their men and their women; grew fat with blood-hungry proboscises stabbed into its veins, sucked dry. The ruble became a laughingstock while they feathered themselves with dollars. Warriors vowing eternal war against the enemies of the proletariat became _businessmen_ overnight.

Everything. It was easy to blame that fat crapulous clown, but he was only the court jester for an oligarchy of scavengers ripping into their nation's pride and its simple _dignity_. Its humanity. He'd seen it. The poverty. The distinguished doctors selling themselves on the street. They were criminals.

Everything had been tossed out to serve greed's scrabbling lust for self-enrichment. And they had the temerity to call his Kápitan and her men _criminals_ . But they'd heard it before. The bullshit from the establishment that knew fucking nothing but about how to aggrandize itself. It was almost a relief that the old man never needed to know _this_. That it wasn't just a fallen land but had imploded; it didn't just hit bottom but kept carving into the cththonic.

“You have that faraway look on your face, Starshii Praporshchik.” He was sure he did.

“I was dreaming about Ryazan, Kápitan. I'm sorry.” She stood there, patient in her impatience. She was always impatient. It was one of those qualities that slapped at him with the awareness of just how _unique_ she was.

Because he was never impatient; it pissed him off to see people fidgeting, unwilling to reconcile themselves with stillness. The old man would stomp home some evenings and he'd never shout, never raise his voice; never raised his hand to any of his family. Nothing like most of the Russians he knew. But there would just be a _hush_ smeared on everything.

A knowledge that his sister and he were to be _very_ quiet, because the old man was quiet; that they should be very still, because the old man was very still. He'd read, and his mother would read or snap on the radio to a volume so _soft_ it was sometimes barely heard over the old tube's sibilance, and the playing would stop.

And his Kápitan seethed with an anxious energy.

“Do you mind if I come in, Starshii Praporshchik. I'm sorry to interrupt your dreams of home.”

“They're only dreams, Kápitan. I wasn't really there.”

“No, I suppose not, comrade. I suppose not. None of us will ever really be there. Even if we went home, we wouldn't be home, would we?” They were even speaking English. He'd never asked where she'd learned it.

It didn't matter, really.

The men had a phrase that was the closest you could ever come to cramming an apathetic weary shrug into language; when he'd heard the black man, Dutch, say it, even in English, it cemented something _very_ significant for him. He knew that Dutch had fought in some filthy war where people's souls wore down faster than their numbers; where life was nothing but waiting for Death's cold wisdom.

It don't mean nothin'.

They'd said it all the time.

Someone slumped down at their post, one of the dushman's Boers speaking a language they all understood, and there'd be the return fire; the coordinated hunt through the mountains, largely only to find a few blood trials swept through the cold stone that shone gray under the flares that popped in languid time-lapse necklaces stringing themselves through the black night.

It don't mean nothin'. They wouldn't even need to _say_ it. Before there was the Kápitan, and even under the fucking jackals they'd push into the unit, men who didn't fucking _belong_ in the Airborne, much less even the Army, well, there would just be eyes flitting to eyes and a silent shake of the head.

_It don't mean nothin'._

They'd see the artillery crump out on huge quick black tongues and they'd trace its path from their mountain fastnesses, tossed down by the fat-bodied bees whose pilots always gave them a _better ye than me_ smile when they twisted their heads and hands down for a last little wave. It'd rumble down the valleys, thunder on-call twenty-four-seven, and it'd be a wicked old god's capricious hand, slapping down at the miserable kishlaki that everyone always just knew were markaz. It didn't matter what they were.

That was the problem. When those science-fiction cigars, the Tu-22s, would race over the valleys and the dusty villages tucked into tangled vineyards in long sprawling compounds and terraced tiers that slouched up into the mountains, they'd pickle their ordnance, always an expend-all-remaining scenario, and there would be huge grimy plumes blasting up to greet their eyes and they knew that more than a few of the black asses were melting off into the dust, too. And they'd cheer.

Even the big man cheered; very, very quietly. Because there wasn't the convenient hard dichotomy between soldier and civilian. Because they were hunting an army of ghosts in two-sided costumes; they could just turn it out, and suddenly the soldier would become just another shrugging peasant villager, and then they could wake up one morning and turn it back over, and they'd be one of the dushmani again.

It was battering your head against a wall and hoping that the wall would surrender first, just because you'd filled your skull with concrete. Maybe it would have worked. Maybe. But the men read. Read prolifically.

It was really all you could do.

“Do you remember Nuristan, comrade?” There was no need for their ranks now. They were play-pretend; but then again, weren't they for any army? Wasn't it only a confluence of word and deed, the consensus in thought, the willingness to believe what was once impossible and became possible only by accord?

Without that, he never would have had a name, even.

She mesmerized him. It was the reason he indulged himself with fleeting little glances. It was like staring at an open camp flame in the dark. You couldn't: It wouldn't blind you, but that fundamental edge, what'd keep you alive in the heavy starless gloom, would be broken. So you just chanced a few glimpses at it.

Or you just luxuriated in the aura. Mostly, you pretended that it didn't exist, because it wasn't something certain.

“Of course, Kápitan-”

“You always call me that, comrade. Always.” She stood. It was melodramatic, sure, but the word was still _resplendent_. She always was. “Look at me, comrade.”

“Mmm?” And it was the usual innocence, of course. Letting his eyes settle just a few inches over her shoulders. “I don't understand, Kápitan-”

“And stop calling me that all of the time. I _am_ your Kápitan, of course. Just as you are my Starshii Praporshchik. But so what? That's for when people salute one another. I'm very tired tonight, comrade. Very tired.” Her voice was so achingly soft, it was almost the radio on those nights when his mother listened quietly not to disturb his old man. A husky elegant breath of a voice like velvet layered on silk on his ears. A cigar slumped from her lips, burnt down to little more than a stub like the casings the huge guns spit out, clanked and clattered around.

The dushmani used them for flower vases, or for roadside bombs, buried in the earth with TNT or gelignite poured patiently and laboriously into them, capped with wax. The flower vases were beautiful. He'd almost wanted to buy one himself while they shuffled through Kabul's market in its bellowing capitalist frenzy.

The profiteers enriched themselves, bloated their accounts with American cash, with Deutschmarks, with any money they could find. Hawked their grenades and their rockets. And there was rarely even the simple poetic bliss in one of them getting it from a dushman bomb. They survived. The shitheads always survived. The assholes always did.

So what did that mean about him?

“I'm sorry to hear that, Kápitan-”

“Call me _comrade_ , at least. You can be very tiresome, you know, sometimes, comrade. Perhaps it's because I'm becoming lazy in my old age. I find it hard even to say your rank sometimes, I've become so _used_ to English. Or maybe it isn't old age.

“Maybe it's because our souls are rotting in this place.” The eyes were star sapphires, twinned and merciless, spearing into him like her rifle's gimlet-eyed stare. He couldn't avert his own from her, of course. You can't look away when a superior officer is addressing you.

It's not that it's impolite.

It's against regulations. Regulations were, _are_ , reality's foundation. Without them, there could only be anarchy. And there could be no chepe in their force. None. None at all. The basmachi may have been its practitioners, but they sure as hell were not.

Even other Afgantsi, well, they could succumb to that fever, that mayhem. But not the Airborne; certainly not the Guards Airborne.

“Do you think so, comrade?”

“I... I don't know what to tell you-”

“Do you want to speak Russian? You speak English well, you know. Even if you've kept your accent.” Her lips quirked around the cigar; it was something slow, almost mischievous. Lush and scarlet, darker than the fingernails she'd let grown into talons that others would have seen as something fragile and weak. They were feminine.

 _She_ was feminine.

But Russians understood better than anyone that femininity wasn't weakness. Her legs were long; arms were fine and sinewy with strength; her body achingly perfect, trim, wrapped with that suit that never seemed anything like a sartorial oxymoron against the hardened soldier that didn't play at being a businesswoman because she _wasn't_.

Because they weren't businessmen. If crime was a business, if war was a business, well, anything could be, then. What would be the difference? Was playing chess a business? Was execution a business? People could make money from anything; people could subsist on anything. You could eat shit for nourishment. Did it make it a business?

It was denial. Maybe it was all denial for him. _Bizinesmen_ had become a byword for crooks, because Russians understood what the decadent West's conception of business was. It was only a quest for ownership. It wasn't fair trade. It wasn't about equanimity.

It was about zero-sum savagery. It was about taking what you wanted, and to hell with everyone else.

Perhaps they were businessmen, then. Her neckline maybe wasn't as indecent as the Lagoon Company's pet psychopath, the Chinese woman in a sweat-darkened belly-baring crop-top and denim shorts that didn't even merit a little imagination. Everything was on display. It was only his Kápitan's chest's softness, its lushness, that attracted the flat stupid animal stares from the submorons that should have known better.

Theirs was a pillowy richness; he wasn't blind to it. They'd only grown with age, with the idleness that even he'd come to admit grudgingly. It wasn't that they'd become soft and impotent. But their talents, their avocation, it was something that lacked the merciless furnace that was the corundum's purification, its perfection. Of course a bit of the silk would creep back into what was otherwise a hard clarified austerity.

Meals were no longer rations choked down without even a smile's pretension. There was fine dining; no paucity of fresh kasha pluming with a lush velvet aroma from the canteen that Serzhánt Krasinski operated with Yefréytori Belyakov and Dragunova. There was never any want now.

And the mountains still splintered his memories in grades of something that was sentimental. Nostalgic. He couldn't just tell himself that it was a waking nightmare, that it should be shrugged off. Even before they'd reunited with the Kápitan, huddled in her miserable one-bedroom tenement, catatonic with the shitty television's cold mesmerism; even before they'd taken the time to celebrate a soldiers' mass for the dead; even before they'd gathered again, the partisans of the Old Order who'd been tossed out, hounded, _persecuted_ by the turncoats and the traitors, he'd fallen in with other men. Other Afgantsi. They'd exchanged subdued murmurs that were often little more than groans. Everything became its own twisted baroque vernacular, a fanciful jumble of local Urdu and Pashtu and Dari pidgin and Russian and babble from the black asses and the cant that every new generation of soldiers stitched together like their uniforms from the standard issue, mark-one-mod-zero language.

A Polkóvnik who'd been almost his father's age, whispering to him on a park bench that he'd do any work for him, any work at all. Can you find a job for an old fellow?

The big man had laughed.

Boris, please, can't you find _anything_ for me?

And he was no longer laughing when _Starshii Praporshchik_ became a simple humble _Boris Feyedorivich_.

You're serious, Polkóvnik Simonov?

And the sharp-edged old bastard, the savage saber-scowled tyrant that'd presided over their Airborne regiment, had imploded. Planting his face in his palms, trembling with the simple shame in it, the _revulsion_ , the knowledge that his esteem had melted into nothing with the fickle political tides, a loyal Communist unwilling to sell himself, his righteousness, for a dollar, in being unable even to afford a few worthless rubles for his wife's medicine, he wept. The big man, Boris, he'd dragged an arm over the Polkóvnik's shoulder, felt the tremors thrashing through him.

_Boris Feyedorovich, what the hell am I supposed to do? Goddammit, what am I supposed to do? What's wrong with us? What's become of us? To think that my best years must have been spent in that hellhole?_

And it was true.

He'd heard it from so many. The Afgantsi that could not confide this in their wives, their children. And the big man, Boris, yes, his mind had migrated in those moments to his old man's own truths, how true maybe they had been. His heroism was something stamped in commendations and in the other old men's eyes, but there was something else that Boris would never have understood without empathy's hard shock like cold water being flung into his face.

They had seen the shit that could never be said to anyone who'd never tasted the subjectivity in it. It wasn't to excuse; it wasn't even to rationalize; it was to _explicate_. To understand the meaning in those moments when you were younger, when you were terrified, when you were just _you_ , there, a stranger in a strange land.

Boris had just nodded.

He had only a few rubles in his pocket, but he'd swollen his chest, blustered like a hurricane, assured the Polkóvnik that he'd found an all right job, just all right, doing construction, and pressed them into the old guy's trembling fingers. Truth was that Boris had been ushered away even from anything even _that_ menial, flinging a hammer and breaking concerete. People who knew people talked; there were the ugly whispers. Fanaticism followed people like an evil shadow, a demon huddled on your back, and nothing could be done.

The Americans and their lackeys would snap off the funding for _anything_ , for a fucking well, for a new apartment block, _anything_ if they scented real Communism's spoor. So Boris was unemployable. Half his friends from the Kápitan's Company had been. They weren't only poor. They were fermenting with desperation.

Their pensions had shriveled into nothing from _barely adequate_. Even the Kápitan was about a month from being tossed from the miserable one-bedroom whose grimy wallpaper peeled and belched out rot's ugly musty stink from the radiator's steam when it _had_ any steam to offer.

It made no sense to him.

To _anyone_.

But the rich venal men and women feasted on caviar in their collaboration while their countrymen starved. And they didn't notice. The arrogant and arrantly ignorant from the past generations, the philistines and the pretentious toddlers that'd deluded themselves they were dissidents, they'd become the dancing bear pseudo-intellectuals for the new regime.

They sneered at decent men and women who hadn't known fresh bread and _meat_ for weeks or even months for failing to appreciate the difference between fresh and frozen orange juice. Many hadn't even _tasted_ an orange since they were supposed to have been freed.

Even Boris had felt the indignation in his heart, shuffling into the endless lines that gathered around the shops.

And then there was what everyone _else_ who didn't need to live it called freedom. And there were still lines, but for even less. And while everyone's pockets bloated with almost pointless wealth in those last delirious days while Gorbachev promised a Brave New World for the Soviet Union, a glorious rebirth in openness, in _reform_ , suddenly in this promised land there was only penury.

What did freedom mean if it was an embarrassment of impossible and ultimately false choices? Between starvation and prostitution? Between suicide or simply slumping down in an alley and letting yourself freeze to death in a city where overnight it was _lawful_ , upright, to kick the homeless who hadn't even been _known_ even a month before?

What was the meaning in obeying a law that protected the hubristic and the cold and the heartless and the inhumane, that exalted an order that understood _nothing_ but grasping dead-eyed avarice while women sold their bodies for their children's meals that were still not enough to keep ribs from splintering through rotting skin when before there had been only a hard peasant vigor?

When people had lived an impossibility, why regress to the well-trodden and the meaningless, the banal?

It was all bullshit. Boris knew it. Everyone knew it. And when they told the Emperor he had no goddamn clothes, the traitors turned tanks on the wise men.

“Are you listening, comrade?” She stood there. Not the past and not a lost future but the _present_ , a heel _clicked_ on the floor. His eyes fell to it; as tyrannical, as hot and urgent in its authority, as any combat boot. Coiling up in tight gauzy fabric that twinkled with sweat's soft diamond motes, enameling and not quite plastering the stockings to her pale skin.

“No. I'm sorry, Kápitan. I didn't sleep very well. I was lost in my thoughts about the old country. About Russia. What shame has taken it.”

“I think about it often, too, comrade. I do, too. It pains me to be... To be _squatting_ here.” She knew it as well as he did, though.

This place's fetid magnetism.

It swallowed souls; it _inhaled_ them. It was a tomb for the living, like the superstitious from long-dead lands who would bury their kings with their families, servants, and pets. A life without living. Living without life. A land of bodies that shuffled on with dead souls.

Just like he'd read again and again in Afghanistan, even stitching the words into his Afghanka with a suturing needle he'd dragged out of the sanitar's kit. Andreyev's _Red Laugh_. There were words that meant more to him than anything. More than any field manual. More than any manual of arms. More than anything but his rifle and the Kápitan.

_The loss of reason in war seems to me honorable, like the death of a sentry at his post._

His old man had the book, counterrevolutionary as it was. He'd dragged it from his library's huge shelves forever groaning with mouldering old tomes that he'd pull down and read, one after the other, when he and his mother weren't fucking with a hot and silent athleticism, serenaded with the faint little whispers and whimpers and deep guttural growls that must have been perfected in the Great Patriotic War's trenches in those furtive moments when humans could still be human. The old man placed it in Boris' hand, told him that this was something to read.

To understand the fever-dream unreality that would take him if there were ever a war.

There had been none of the formulaic incantations. They were there, of course, to fight a war, whatever war was convenient at the time. They were machinery, as surely replaceable and expendable and still indispensable as the BMPs and the BTRs and the other armor. They were as fundamentally mechanistic in their use as any rifle, any artillery gun.

They would fight the West.

The spring had been tightened, ratcheted closer and closer and closer to breaking for decades, with the West's arrogance, its truculence, and, so the men and women quietly admitted to themselves, their own government's. The moments not _lost_ so much as tossed away when they chose war instead of peace.

And people suffered for it.

“But there are worse possibilities, aren't there, comrade?” Probably. Boris knew there were. Huddling in a cold apartment overlooking Moscow streets that Saint Capitalism had allowed to run with filth and shit and grime and littered with broken bottles and drunks that the militsia would have carted off in a second with either a cuff on the head or a kindly, _Comrade, do you have nowhere to stay?_ , that would have been worse.

It _was_ worse. He'd lived with a young whore who'd tried to pay him in nature for his kindness in beating the shit out of johns that had gotten too rough. It made his gut revolt, the spectacle in a girl young enough to be his daughter, even his _granddaughter_ if he'd been as blindingly irresponsible in some hungry youth, and his son or daughter, also, offering her body to him. She was beautiful; so achingly beautiful.

The eyes had already died; her soul had been benumbed with heroin like the non-hacker molodoi who didn't belong there in the mountains or the garrisons fucked up with enough koknar to blacken their stare and send them weaving out into the gardens of mines they'd sewn into the hills like an oblivious dushman.

“Yes, there are, Kápitan. I know there are.”

“You're thinking about after our country fell away into nothing.” Forever, that wistful sigh that was every true Communist's despair. Her eyes settled on his curtains, heavy and thick and such a deep burgundy that it ran black in the dark; darker than even her suit's bloody soft hues. It became a sartorial shadow, cradling and muddling her sharp shapes and round grace until there was only her face and her décolletage and hair that shimmered like cold ash on sand.

“That's right, Kápitan.”

“It was hard. You were living with a woman, weren't you?” It snapped at his gut like a rotting rubber band finally surrendering its last few threads.

“No, Kápitan. I was cohabiting with a woman; I was too poor to afford an apartment on my own, and my sister and her husband didn't have enough room for me.”

“You don't need to be timid about that, comrade.” She turned. Slowly. Patiently. The cigar had died; cooling embers had darkened to a flat charcoal like his mother's hair.

“I'm not being timid, Kápitan. I'm only making an important correction. I had no relationship with the young lady-”

“You're so arch. You're not my Starshii Praporshchik notifying me of a change in the tactical situation.”

“I'm sorry, Kápitan. I don't mean to be. It's only that... It was a difficult time in my life. I think sometimes it's best to forget about it.”

“Because she killed herself?”

“Yes.” With his service pistol. The old Tokarev had been a gift from his old man. _Every real soldier needs a sidearm, son. You'll find out just how much it means having something you can hold close to your belly at night in a foxhole._ The girl was slumped there on a decrepit overstuffed sofa, stained and with its faded floral pattern running black with blood spilling down her bare skin.

She'd sat there naked, something dragged almost from Greek statuary. The pistol lay in her right hand, awkwardly twisted across the fabric. It had startled her. In her last moment. He'd seen it more than a few times, non-hackers who just couldn't take it, couldn't cope, couldn't _wait_ to become Citizens again, so they slipped their mouths around their Kalashnikov's barrel or they found or bought or stole a pistol somewhere and did it.

And it wasn't simple. There would always be a flinch, always be some urgent hot _jerk_ in those last moments. There was a stink of gunpowder and charred skin and hair and flesh were matted on the wall and ceiling.

Boris had seen the dead in countless moments, and he still didn't know what to do. She didn't belong in that world. So he'd shrouded her in the only clean sheet he could dredge up and buried her in a lonely field outside the city, grunting and sweating through the night to carve a trench at least two meters deep for her so that the dogs and wild beasts wouldn't drag her out, wouldn't ruin what little dignity she still could steward for herself. It was an unmarked grave, an unmarked life, scattered with a few petals he'd pulled from a lonely tree in blossom.

“It's a hard thing, comrade. A very hard thing. Watching death before its time. I think about the men and women we lost in Afghanistan, and I wonder if maybe they weren't the lucky ones.” It would have been a beautiful and optimistic and _uplifting_ thing for Boris to feel some inane _Kápitan?_ on his lips with a perfect incomprehension.

But he understood too perfectly to admit that.

“Yes. I think maybe they had been blessed to die in battle with a worthy adversary, Kápitan. The basmachi were nothing like those other Afghan soldiers. The mere ghosts who could only be counted on to abandon a position when we needed them.

“How was it that the basmachi could fight so ferociously, and the other Afghans so meekly? Why were they content to be churki when the basmachi could fight even our armored forces to a standstill, could swat down bumblebees so courageously?” It tormented him.

Everyone.

Not that there _weren't_ Afghans who could fight. Who were loyal Communists almost fundamentalist in their need to drag their people and their strange fractious beautiful country out of the dark ages.

But what didn't they understand?

They were there to _uplift_ them.

“Yes, comrade. I think you're right. Where is the worth in fighting a collection of jumped-up greedy Chinamen, black asses from backward shitholes in South America? They're not meaningful foes. There's no reason at all to fight, to die.

“I fear they're atrophying us, comrade. My good friend, do you think maybe we would fall in battle to the dushman now if we fought them in our condition? Have we grown soft?”

“Kápitan?”

“Call me _Sofiya_ , won't you, Boris?” It was something, well, it was almost a chepe.

“Kápitan, I-”

“You're in your shorts and undershirt, Boris. I'm wearing a suit. We're not in uniform, anymore.”

“The uniform is in the mind, Kápitan. We are soldiers, and we always will be. They can strip us naked, and we will still fight as proud Airborne Commandos-”

“That isn't what I mean. You don't need to be so _rigid_ , you know. All the time. Especially with me. Around the men, I can understand it. It's about discipline, after all. And especially now, we can ill afford to go native like these filthy primitives. But we are alone now.

“We've known discipline so great that it's turned us to iron.”

“Iron can still dull, Kápitan-”

“Fine. Bulat.” The woman's smile was quick, fanged. It always entranced him, the savage cold grace in the immaculate teeth that twisted apart voluptuous lips like his mother's. “Are you happy?”

He understood the question.

But it slapped deeper than just the wry smile.

Was he happy?

“Boris? Or does that upset you? For me to call you by your name, Boris Feyedorovich?”

“No. It does not upset me, Kápitan-”

“Call me Sofiya. This is an order, if you'd like to think of it as one. I don't want to be your Kápitan tonight. I am very tired. But I can't sleep. Do you know what I did, Boris?”

“No, Ka... No, Sofiya.” There was something alien in it, like speaking a taboo and probably heretical incantation. “I do not.”

“I watched that old movie, _Hedgehog in The Fog_. Do you remember the one, Boris?”

“Yes... Sofiya.” Again, again, the hot strange dissonance in even imagining that. That transgression. That was what it was, wasn't it? It was almost a corruption. It meant something. Clearly. How could it _not_?

Without that frisson through the gut and tolling like a bell's merciless seesawing reverberation, well, what _could_ it have meant? It was only normality. Only as surely trivial as opening a door, snapping off a light.

Pulling the trigger.

“I'd hoped you would have, Boris. Do you remember where you first saw it?”

“In Kabul, Sofiya. During one of the uprisings. The children were terrified, and their parents weren't faring much better.” Boris stood. The flesh was forever willing; it wasn't even that it was cooperative or not. It just was.

He stood because his life had been at attention since the bone had set enough to rear up stiff-backed and stern at his father's soft and irresistibly authoritative command.

“That's right. Leytenánt... Am I getting old, Boris?”

“Leytenánt Popov, Sofiya?” The smile that greeted him was heavy with age's regrets.

“I must be getting old. Or maybe I'm only losing my mind. That's right. Leytenánt Popov ordered it brought in, but no one could use the projector. We needed to ask an engineering student who was almost pissing himself with fear to do it. The children were less scared than he was.

“I thought it was wonderful. I always thought that it was written more for adults than children. They loved it, though. Do you remember? Even their high-strung parents calmed down, the intellectuals who came to uplift the dushman and only found themselves desperately afraid, like teaching a grizzly bear how to read.” It was true.

Boris had seen it, again and again. The brilliant eyes when they minced through Kabul's Silk Road fantasia. And then shuddered when they saw the truth: That it was an ugly, dirty, backward hellscape, a playground for the horrors in dusty rags who made their women fear them, who strung up and disemboweled schoolgirls for learning to read. It was better for men like Boris, for women like the woman named Sofiya they called Balalaika now.

They were there. Still, forever there, his Kápitan behind her Dragunov, a quick tug at the trigger perfect for the Olympics, a destined biathlete. The rifle's growls were heavier than a Kalashnikov's higher chatter; the slow stuttering _crack-crack-crack_. Deliberate, achingly graceful, a twist and a pivot, their Afganki sodden with sweat, stripped to the waist in the dusty inferno, the dushman little more than a distant nebulous quirk on a meaningless horizon.

“Yes, I remember, Sofiya. It was a disappointment to me. To watch how quickly the intellectuals became disenchanted, and how quickly they became cowards.”

“They weren't soldiers, Boris.”

“Everyone was a soldier in Socialism's army, Sofiya. They're the reason our country fell apart. It wasn't the military. It was the civilian selfishness. It was their willingness to embrace greed and individualism over the collective.

“Our leaders were the worst of all. Jackals. Do you remember, Sofiya?” It hadn't quite slipped into an easy comfort, but the word was there now, almost effortless on his tongue.

“Yes, Boris. I remember. I remember all too well.” Her cigar was more a cold dead adornment than anything. “Do you mind if I light another cigar in your room? I know you don't smoke.”

“It's all right, Sofiya. Whatever you'd like.”

“Because I'm your commanding officer?” The question was soft on her lips. It wasn't vulnerable; that wasn't the word. The woman named Balalaika, the Kápitan named Sofiya Pavlovna, they didn't admit _vulnerability_. Or at least, they didn't broadcast it. He knew that. But it wasn't only wry and laconic.

“Of course not, Sofiya.”

“Do you like the smell of my cigars?” He did.

“Yes.” The heavier and almost treacly aroma. An ineffable essence of something in the gunpowder. It had been their scent once. Hers was perfume now, faint and tasteful, a whisper of cherry petals and lilac and vanilla. It wasn't a perfume, was it?

 _Eau de toilette_.

It was soft and wafted from her wrists with her hands' every languorous twist. His eyes would settle on her neck, long and swanlike, and there would be the inevitable wondering. Was its warm scent there, also?

It was simpleminded.

Childish.

Boris was not a virgin. He had not been for a very long time. And if virginity was only a sense of innocence, then Boris had never known anything so childish, so _Western_ and decadent. Innocence was an exalted ignorance. His parents' frolicking, well, maybe it was rutting, and sometimes its violence seethed and his mother's voice would be strangled and the old man would clap a hand on her mouth because the walls weren't paper-thin, but it was courteous with a neighbor with her folks there, and his hips would slap at hers like an act of desecration.

The old man would tear at his mother. And they would watch, transfixed, Boris and his sister, Darya, her long black hair tugged back into a thick tail that traced a long arc fragrant with their mother's makhorka and the house's warm homely aromas of books and simple military meals and perfume, also. And she would drape an arm on his shoulder; her cheeks' heat slapped at his.

Was he flushing, also, in those memories?

She'd breathe heavily; drag in long gasps that were almost pants. When she was eight and he was five, there was giggling, soft and with her fingers twisted across her lips, almost wiring closed her jaws. When she was fourteen and he was eleven, the giggling had melted down into a heavy leaden gravity, a sense of reverence for it. She would stand on his right; sometimes, her right hand just wasn't _there_ , her fine fingers tearing at Boris' shoulder.

A strangled little _gasp_.

When she was seventeen and Boris was fourteen, and had felt bones almost splinter, flesh twist and strain, muscle bloat with the old man's exercise regimen and youth's vitality, Darya's heavy soft breasts would rock against his shoulder and he understood what it meant for _her_ at fourteen.

“I'm glad, Boris. I'd hate to have obnoxious habits.” Nothing she did was obnoxious. Even if they were loathsome for other people, nothing his Kápitan did _could_ be. “Even what happened with those children?” There was nothing for him to say. “I know it's been troubling you, Boris.

“What I ordered the men to do. My... Incapacity to forgive. They were only children. Answer me candidly, Boris. You're cleared to speak freely, Starshii Praporshchik.”

“It bothers me, yes. Not enough to make me feel any ill will, Kápitan, but... It bothers me. There was no need for you to do that. We lost men in ignominy; that was true. But it was the Italians who had brought them there.

“Our vengeance should have been for Verocchio and his men. In a certain way, they almost atoned for their own misdeeds.”

“That's a very elegant way of reasoning it out, Boris.” The cigar's damp bulk settled on the ashtray that adorned every room. The other men smoked; they were bought in gross. But it wasn't the familiar Soviet austerity. Sharp facets twinkled in the dead light from a small lamp that he'd intuitively snapped into a sullen pool on his bed stand.

Another cigar was dragged from a pocket.

“Was I wrong to do that, Boris?”

“You're our Kápitan-”

“The officers that led us were often wrong, Boris.”

“But we believe in you. _I_ believe in you. What you did was...” It was an ordeal to grope for the words, because duty and adoration warred with cold clinical wisdom and even the jumble of ideals and ideas and desires and hopes and warm sentimentalism that might have been called a conscience if had been issued with the appropriate GRAU number.

It was a silent war without mercy, one that snapped to and fro.

Mutual atrocities and a scorched-earth fervor. But like the dushman, the thoughts were elusive, pirouetting away, teflon-lubricated oils that scrabbled out of his fingers and splattered themselves across the floor like ash, like broken glass, and dragging up one, much less every one, well, it was altogether too painful.

He _did_ resent that she'd inflicted that on them.

“Unnecessary, Sofiya.” A swallowed creased her throat; it stabbed out, thick spittle in a hard relief through creamy skin striped but not blemished with the scars that never disfigured her. It roared up, a vengeful and implacable venom, whenever any of those unworthy black asses, those Chinamen, those senseless thugs dared even to whisper imprecation against a badge that was unlike any medal. Medals could be given at a whim; they could be revoked, whatever their just meaning.

Scars could never be.

He knew this.

“I see. Unnecessary, Boris? Would it have been a chepe?”

“To shoot children that we could have taken into custody? Yes. Back when things made sense, when we... When there was an order to things, I would have said so, Sofiya.”

“Would you have lost faith in me?”

“No. Of course not.”

“I rescued that child. Not so long ago. You and the men didn't lose faith in me then, either. I wonder if it's this city, Boris. If its rot has started to change me.” Cool eyes like rarefied gems, yes, perfect star sapphires, they wandered along the room. To his right arm.

His face.

“I'm not sorry I did it, Boris. I'm sorry that I put all of you through that for my sake. I do apologize for that. I can't bring myself to feel regret or remorse for it. Those children were no longer children.

“They were no longer even _alive_.”

“Are we, Sofiya?” Her smile sat there, numb and still like a dazed dog. She didn't even bother with the usual guillotine whose deft snapping stroke glinted with cold silver. Flawless teeth became fangs, gnawed off the cigar's stub. Her lighter was quick, nimble fingers snapping it open with a decisive stroke.

Her thumb rasped once, and again, and again at the flint. It coughed. Wheezed like an asthmatic in a dust storm.

“This damnable lighter.” Adorned with the Red Star; a brilliant scarlet point that whispered of hot fire in cold metal. “I must not have fueled it. Care to give me a light?”

“Always, Sofiya.” He didn't smoke; every soldier still needed a lighter. It lay on his bed stand, pride of place beside the Kalashnikov's muzzle whose fat stubby brake stared up dimly at the ceiling's murky hardwood shadows. His was fueled; it was a weekly phenomenon, splashing the wick with acrid naphtha, only a few chemical increments away from napalm.

“Thank you.” She leaned close. It was something intimate. He always knew those moments, those private secluded instants. The lighter spoke, _chang_ ed open and flowered with a tongue of flame like wet molten carnations, an inverted shadow writhing with a belly dancer's elegances. Fire devoured his eyes.

Always.

The cigar's tip became a hot flash like an illum shell's drift from its parachute, a strange miniature star popping off in a great nova that turned reality into flickering shadowed drifts, ethereal sallow light sliding across a landscape that shone cold even in a swelter that turned an afganka into a sopping furnace. It was staring at the moon.

The smoke became a warm presence, soft velvet fingers of ash brushing at his nostrils. She dragged in a long lingering breath, let it pour out again from ruby lips slackening a bit around the tawny tube that looked like nothing more than a one-twenty-two under that hard brass light.

There was only silence now. For a moment that dilated into an hour.

Eyes irised closed slowly, slowly, and opened again.

“Do you mean that, Boris?” And then her voice came, crept like the dushman, a mortal patience in a dreadful cold-hearted game hot with blood and seething with sweat.

“Do I mean what, Sofiya-”

“You know what I'm asking you. What you asked me. I thought about this. About what it meant to be alive while I watched the movie with the little hedgehog walking through the terrible thick mist.

“I thought about what I've heard time and again from the men in their great proud palaces in Moscow. In Leningrad- no, not even Leningrad anymore, is it, Boris? Everything we fought for. That terrible siege.

“And then they gave its name back to the Germans, to the _fascists_. It's Saint Petersburg again. I loved Leningrad. Its great culture. Its strange gingerbread-house buildings. But I never would have thought I would hear these things from men I once thought could be trusted and respected. That we shouldn't be unhappy about what has happened.

“We may be prostrate; we may be helpless before the West in its greed; we may have cast away our self-respect. But we are _free_ , aren't we?” It wasn't only hard-bitten; they were huge bitter jaws drooling venomous spittle and crunching through the bone, ripping off the meat. “Are we not free, Boris?”

“Is this what they call freedom, Sofiya?”

“Yes. Freedom to prostitute yourself or starve. To die quietly on the street or in prison. Freedom to...” Her eyes always devoured him. They were his attention's locus, its obsession. Drifting across the walls.

He could hear it, because it ricocheted between his own ears, children crashing with manic amphetamine frenzy through a timpani section.

_Freedom to become this._

Were they _unfree_ in the Soviet Union?

What the hell was freedom, anyway?

“Is this freedom, Boris Feyedorovich? Freedom to kill like a fucking _bandit_ in this ugly city where the sun sets in an instant, where it feels sometimes like it never rises at all? I feel like that hedgehog, walking in the mist.”

“Yes, Sofiya.” Was Boris the bear, then, that the hedgehog sought?

“Do you remember Nuristan? Like I asked?”

“Of course, Sofiya.”

“It was beautiful, wasn't it? The deep valleys crashing down into the rivers? The scraggly sparse trees? The high peaks?” It was something poetic. And it was true. You could forget. For a fleeting few intervals between breaths, in those moments when _nothing_ mattered at all, you could forget the meaning in being there. You'd take leave of your own body, the pack's weight and the webbing's metal-limbered heft, and the rifle slung over your chest, and you'd stare out at the terraced villages in tiers of stilts and dun rock and mud and brick, and you weren't a man or a woman at all.

You were something staring down at the beautiful borderless country from so far above that man's artifice meant nothing at all. A kiting crow; an eagle whose huge unfurled wings could carry it from Bukhara to Kabul, from Orenburg to Vladivostok, and you wouldn't even notice the trivial little morsels of humanity, wouldn't understand the slab-sided metal dragons belching smoke, wouldn't appreciate anything but a mouse's quick flit and the pewter flash of the rivers whose coiling iridescence glittered under a perfect sun.

“It was, Sofiya. I remember it very well.”

“The worst fighting we'd ever seen. It was worse than even those raids into Pakistan. I liked being in Peshawar more than Kamdesh. I always wondered how people living in such a beautiful place could be so horrible, could be so ugly.”

“Yes, Sofiya.”

“We did so much then.”

“We were much younger.”

“You think we're old, Boris?” The smile was quick, wry, a glint through cool blue eyes.

“Older, Kápitan.”

“Too old for this?”

“Never.”

“There are times when I wonder if the luckiest ones really are those that go in battle.”

“My father said he regretted it. That there wasn't a war for him to fight and die in after he'd had his family. He was much older than my mother when they married.”

“Yes, that's right. She was a beautiful woman. And your sister, also. How is Darya?”

“Fine, Sofiya. I still speak to her sometimes.”

“You know, I always wondered. Why we were really there. We came with the best of intentions; or so everyone said. The Afghans were such _bestial_ people. Not the ones in the cities. The enlightened Socialists. But the tribes.

“Who kills doctors, teachers, little girls who just wanted to go to school? Do you think we were right to fight there?”

“I don't know.” It was true. “I know that we fought the wrong way, Sofiya. The way that the High Command fought the war. They should have learned from the Americans. Like that black man, Dutch.” It was raw.

Tight in his voice.

His gut.

“You don't like Dutch, do you, Boris?”

“I don't have any opinions at all about him-”

“Is it because he's an American? A _chernokozhii_.” It was ironical, almost lyrical, in Russian.

“No, Sofiya. It isn't that.”

“Is it because I'm on good terms with him? Because I count him amongst my friends?” Wasn't she blindingly unfair? “That must be it.” The smile was a predator's. “Or maybe it's something else, Boris. Is that possibly what it is?”

“Kápita-”

“I _told_ you to stop calling me that when we're alone, Boris. Didn't I? Do I need to give history's most ironic order?” Fanged. Ferocious. “Tell me, Boris. Won't you? Is it not because he's my friend, but because you think there's something else?”

It knotted his gut.

The flesh twisted and plaited and torn into itself.

“Sofiya, it's-”

“You must think so. Isn't that right, Boris?” Closer, and closer, and closer. Her heels a soft _click-click-click_ across the hardwood. Nothing like combat boots. She was achingly beautiful. Tall, and he still dwarfed her.

Soared over everyone.

The cigar's smoke dry and hard and acrid; her breath sweet and satiny and damp when long fine fingers plucked it from her lips. It was something evocative, slow and patient, dragging red darker and softer than blood around it. They puckered; squeezed.

There wasn't really a great deal to camouflage the movement between his thighs.

“Tell me the truth. Don't act like a sixteen-year-old. Right!” Eyes' mischievous brilliance and her voice soaring up at once to snap at his senses. “You weren't a virgin when you were sixteen. Even _I_ was.

“Remember when we talked? At camp, that night? When we'd finally been relieved after three weeks on the mountains? When we finally saw those beautiful Mils thump over the horizon? How their engines _screamed_ to us, Boris.

“And the bumblebees sending their long pretty contrails from rockets crashing into the valley. Do you know how relieved I was, my beloved friend? Do you know how _afraid_ I was? Half the parachutes for the supplies missed.

“Watching them drift. Slowly. Down. Right onto the dushmani's heads.” Her nails so achingly close. Ash flitted like a swallow's loose feathers from the cigar. “They were shooting us with our own bullets.

“But we _won_ , Boris.”

“We always won. We won every battle-”

“Yes. But we weren't fighting the same battles.” Laughter, dewy on his skin.

Their afganki weren't just sodden with sweat. They'd gathered a thick crackling rind, lead-white against the tawny camouflage. There wasn't only an odor; it was a universe of _stink_ , of fetor, their skin almost black with dust, their lips and their teeth. Flecked with enough shrapnel to yield a sharp warble from Mládshii Serzhánt Verennikov's minesweeper when he brushed it over them with that high giddy cackle.

Enough stone stitched into their skin, worse than the shells' shrapnel, blasting up in huge ragged plumes from the dusty blossoms, to be like human mountains. And they were alive. And how _achingly_ beautiful she was. Her hair matted with grease, blackened almost like his sister's, spilling out of a beret that was less the Airborne's sainted sky-blue and more slate.

And it was still talons like her fingernails now twisted into his heart to see her. To clamber last aboard the helicopter and rap at the hull, to bark a quick command through the radio.

_Comrades, we've been relieved. We will return to base, and rest, and come back to bring the fight to the enemy wherever he can be found!_

It wasn't a _slump_. Slumping commanded a vitality they couldn't even conceive. It was deeper than exhaustion. It was the sense of an out-of-body delirium, being so far beyond debility that they could have fought for another thousand years, their souls' last hot cinders animating everything more than any flesh. They'd melt into their uniforms; their bones would become the stone and the shrapnel and the bullets; their rifles would speak with the cold lucid authority of the fearless undead.

“But you must remember, Boris. Back at the camp. In the barrack. Mine. When the men were asleep, so exhausted they could barely eat. When the air-conditioner barely _worked_. When the food was terrible, even at camp, and still the most delicious thing we'd ever tasted.

“You must remember. When we stayed up, listening to that bootleg one of the guys brought over. What was the band? You must remember.”

“KINO. They had a samizdat cassette. Of course. You took it from him-”

“I said I was confiscating counterrevolutionary influences, and he'd get it back when I was good and bored with it.” Their laughter was older than the wind on the rocks. “It was Menshov's, wasn't it? A good man.

“He gave us quite the night together, didn't he? In his own _very_ accidental way, Boris.” It tolled out like distant incoming. Battered down every nerve. Jerked at his veins. “We talked. And talked. Over a bottle of that horrible sweet Uzbek wine. Why did everyone have that? It made me sick, almost.

“But it was nice, wasn't it?”

“Yes, Sofiya. It was.” Felt his voice growing deeper, heavier. His body hotter, and not only with Sofiya's simple warmth that sprawled out from her like a diabolic aura. It was an act of mesmerism.

A cobra captivating a mouse.

“Remember what you told me, talking about that thing that humans need more than anything but air and water? And I think most would trade water for it. You told me-”

“I'm still afraid of it, Sofiya. How much you risk yourself sometimes. Just like then.”

“What commanding officer isn't willing to do more than all of her men? How can they respect her?”

“We respect you because you've earned our respect-”

“I don't want it to be only in the past-tense, Boris. And what about you?” Her nails finally settled on his chest. It was a simple touch. It's not as if no one had ever set their hands on his body. There was still even the telnyashka.

He could persuade himself it meant nothing.

Possibly even believe it.

“What about me, Sofiya?”

“Is it just respect? Only respect you feel for me?” What was the answer? The perfected answer for a question that knew only _one_? And then again, that answer was the worst possible answer.

Because it meant defying those fundamental boundaries that people _needed_ to live as they did. Because it was a system; because that system was assembled with a sublime cold logic, as flatly unassailable as any machinery.

“You remember, yes, Boris? When we talked. We talked, and talked. I'd never seen you even a little drunk before. I felt so _wasted_. Do you remember what you told me?”

“About my rifle?”

“That, too.” It was there. Of course. It lurked in memory; sprang out at him like a feral beast snapping from the forest undergrowth while he slumbered, while the past and the present and future, also, became intruders that no walls, no barbed wire, no tanglefoot and no mines and no discipline could ward away.

The hot whisper to her.

_It was so strange, Kápitan-_

_Call me, Sofiya. That's my name, Starshii Praporshchik._

_Sofiya. I'd handled a Kalashnikov before. My father was a Polkóvnik. But never **my** rifle before. Never like in basic training. Advanced training. It felt like a wife to me. That was how they told us to think about our weapons._

_Like women. Stripping her down..._

_What did you name her? I named mine Natalya, after a friend I had from the Young Pioneers._

It gathered thick in his throat.

He hadn't ever confided it in anyone.

Taboo's hot snap.

_Well, Starshii Praporshchik?_

_Ah... You see, Kápitan-_

_Sofiya. I'm **ordering** you to call me Sofiya. _

They'd sat together, both of them hunched on the camp bed that was the simplicity she suffered in solidarity with every common enlisted man, every miserable soldier, short and only a few hours from trundling out of their collective horror's borders and becoming a Citizen again or the littlest bird with two years left. Knees brushed.

Her fingers a faint little whisper on his leg. His on hers.

They were innocuous things; incidental things. Her hair had been washed. No. Not merely washed. _Scoured_. His carved away to a close-cropped shag across his scalp, but hers was still worn long, thick, a lush blonde like rarefied gold. Its fragrance was shampoo's clean aroma. A new set of battledress, like his, the afganki they were issued and they'd already warped beyond anything like standard-issue.

The quartermaster never bitched at them; not the Airborne. They weren't quite the spetsnaz men and women that sequestered themselves in their own camps, the GRU's and KGB's prima donnas, but theirs was a time-in, a combat experience, that the spetsnaz would never have.

_You're not going to tell me, Boris?_

_Ah, you see..._

_Is it embarrassing?_

_Yes._

It was.

It was even now.

Her eyes had shone a dark woad, like they did at this instant. Her fingers were rougher then; _his_ were. Swept with scars' faint seams; gnarled with calluses; the nails weren't only trimmed but snapped off, half of them not even there, ripped from the root in their scrabble through ragged defiles and sudden plunging chasms and long snarling sawtoothed ridges.

She'd set a hand on his chest. It was hotter than a mid-afternoon sun.

Tell me.

_Darya. That was my rifle's name._

_Oh._

The smile was wicked; not judgment but only a hot inquisition, trembling and a little glassy with the wine.

_Isn't that your sister's-_

_Well, yes, but..._

_Why?_

_It's..._

Very complicated.

Her breasts' heavy soft brush against his shoulder. His parents' raucous rutting. The hunger and frenzy and the hot iron fist snapped on his gut. Alone with Darya, the radio pulsing with the Singing Guitars, profoundly counterrevolutionary miniskirt cradling long shapely legs lean and well-muscled with her Komsomol exercises. Large breasts straining against a tight shirt that was still damp with the water that had plastered hair worn long like an obsidian stripe down her back.

It was something that was permitted because of their old man. It must have been their mother's hair color before something had charred it to an iron-hard gray.

Her feet were bare, quick across the floor.

Hands outstretched; urging him closer. She hadn't slipped off the glasses that she needed for anything nearer than about five feet. It was strange; she'd loathed them. And he'd made some offhanded remark that afternoon about her being ridiculous, complaining about them like that.

Girls who wore glasses were prettier, anyway.

Dance with me, won't you, Borya? C'mon. A boy who can't dance will _never_ get the girl in the end, no matter how good-looking he is. Unless he's General Secretary, anyway. How soon do you think you can get into the Politburo?

They'd laughed. It was stupid. They were stupid. Closer, and closer, the radio a distant sigh, numb like morphine. Everything had been. He'd never even felt it, but that was its essence: A feathery dreamy heat that poured up from the backs of your knees. Her fingers on his back; and then on his nape. Dragged closer, and closer.

Taller than her, even when he was fifteen and she was almost eighteen. Her body's slow sinuous ripple and twist. And then her fingertips settling with firm nails on his cheeks.

Eyes black like his; a hot whisper misting on the large dark-framed lenses. Breath thick in his throat.

It was a moment that felt like an ambush. When there was a moment that both parties, comfortably ignorant in the dark, could just drift past one another without a word, without a whisper, perfectly content to admit life in its simplicity without the frenzied spattering mayhem, the tracers' sudden spray stitching broken emerald links through the dark, the grenades' hot _crack_ and the artillery's mechanical sunrise.

But one of them must have moved.

Must have breathed.

Darya's mouth didn't _fall_ ; it sprang up, lunged, lips not only soft but something unreal, a luscious plump heat on his. It wasn't only electricity; it was fastening your hands around a bare wire and throwing back your head and rejoicing in the lightning that coruscated through you. It was insanity, churning every muscle into convulsion.

It wasn't one of those convenient moments when the visceral shock jarred two away from one another, and everything was cast away with a will to abandon it to amnesia's facile nihil.

No.

Because there was only conviction. Hers to attack.

His not to resist.

Hunger; eyes a sharp and brilliant negative light that writhed with the warm glow from the lamps, subdued and almost sulfurous in the half-darkness. The windows overlooked a courtyard that was simply meaningless, the curtains drawn, and her fingers twisted through Boris' hair.

_Borya. Borya. You like me, don't you? Don't you love me, too? You're so handsome. I want to get to you first before the other girls take you away. You don't think I'm disgusting, right? For this?_

He didn't. No. He loved her, of course.

She was his sister.

She was beautiful.

They weren't lonely children; it was more that they had little commonality with others their age. They placed first, and that was it, because their old man and their mother expected that of them. Disciplined, iron-hard, a martial conviction in everything, an ambition to the sky-blue beret, to being a Guardsman, a Guardswoman- yes, that was Darya's, also.

Their parents bought German rubbers; the Soviet ones were shit, ungainly galoshes. It was something unreal, that sudden violent _rupture_ in reality. In virginity, and then its vanishing. In never having even felt a woman's kiss on his lips, and suddenly Darya's mouth wet and wandering down his neck. His trousers jerked away; fingers raking at his thighs, his hips.

Staggering through the apartment's corridors, immaculate and stained with their mother's lingering presence in the makhorka's sharp acrid slap. Her shirt dragged off; her skirt hiked up and hands clasping, clutching.

Soft murmuring little importunings.

_Yes. Yes. There. It's... Don't be worried; don't be afraid. Touch me. Touch me. It's... Ah, be gentle **there**. I'm, well, you know..._

Yes.

The first a tremor slaloming up his legs from his ankles.

Her hand on it; a sudden gasp and a wet-hot skein gathering on her belly. Laughter, husky and subdued and headier than anything.

_That was fast, huh? You don't take care of it yourself?_

He didn't often.

_This time, you should last a lot longer, right? That's what Maryusha told me. She's already doing it with her boyfriend._

The rubber rolled over his skin.

Tight and feeling that hunger strain against it.

_Sorry, but... How would we explain **that** to mama?_

It was a meaningless apology. Still, still, there was that animal clamoring for her. For the wet clarified honesty that his fingers had felt. What could he say? Nothing. A vacuous little nod.

Her arms wound around his shoulders.

Nails daggering into his skin.

A tormented long rasp.

_It's... You know, my first, too. You get that, right? You have to be gentle._

Slowly.

Slowly.

A ship's patient sway and rock.

Her eyes straining open; snapping closed.

_W-wow, Maryusha said it'd just be... Be pain and nothing else the first time. It feels **really** good. I mean, it- it'd have to, right, with how much mama and papa do it, right? And just... Oh..._

Words melting off into nothing.

Becoming a vapor that stirred the dark like cigarette smoke.

And again. More exuberant. Not with their parents' rubbers; they would have noticed if _that_ many vanished. A few discreet payments to the kids they knew from Komsomol whose parents had the right friends.

Exploring.

Knowing.

His skin already rough from exercise, from the volunteer labor that was something not just expected but _compulsory_ for a military man's powerful son.

Her skin achingly soft and fine.

Not every detail confided, of course; not every vagary in that portrait that sprawled out until Darya's admission letter fell into the postbox on a Tuesday morning. To Baumanka. The bittersweet epiphany in her black eyes; the last night, her shadow falling through his room's door frame.

_Boris, I had no idea. That sounds very romantic for such a hard man._

And Sofiya hadn't jeered at him; he hadn't heard what he would have expected.

Your _sister_?

However beautiful she was.

And now she was here. Kápitan Sofiya Pavlovna. Disgraced and fallen, like he was; her stars had been dragged away, and his, also. And they were still there, tattooed with the shrapnel and forgotten bullets and bits of Afghanistan's earth that had become more a home than their own land, the place that had cast them out, obdurate Old Believers who refused to admit the new arrogant catechism.

Her fingers slipped up, up.

“You touched me so well that night, you know, Boris. Did you think I'd forgotten? Or the other times we did?” It was something that hadn't been _brazen_. Even the moments taken discreetly, not alone but just _unnoticed_ , or maybe they just deluded themselves about it, in the field. The men said nothing.

But Soviet citizens knew to be quiet when needed.

Sofiya. Yes.

He'd let the name from fantasy's shackles. Let it dance and wheel like the cold moon that speared through her barrack's dusty windows. It was something dreamy, diffuse, spraying its feathery light over them. Her body was leaner then; harder.

His, also, wasn't it?

Her breasts not quite so large; still hand-filling, a plumpness that yielded like aspic under coarse fingers. Nipples thick and ringed with skin softer than silk.

Hair not like Darya's at all; trimmed deliberately away from those lush lips that slipped apart under his fingers.

“No, Sofiya. I don't think you've forgotten-”

“Have you forgotten?”

“Never.” And it was a simple truth. It just couldn't be. She hadn't rebuffed him when they'd reunited; she just said nothing. She'd said nothing since liquid fire had splashed on her skin with a savage frivolity; since it had danced over her, shadowless and huge, a deep horrible lowing like a wounded calf from her lips while she dropped the rifle, let its wood slap at the hot stone, tossed herself in the dust and twisted, pitched, the other men either curtaining her with sand gathered in huge heaps or shrieking their own anguish.

The bandages fell heavily on her; she was silent while the fat-bellied medevac _whomped_ through the hot dry air, arms wound around her chest, staring down at the men that hadn't had the good fortune only to be spattered a bit. They were charred, a hideous napalm stink in gasoline and white phosphorus' garlic and roasted meat like shishlak, cowled in blankets not for the Airborne commandos' comfort but the sanchast who gagged into their masks.

The Airborne wanted to bury their own in the land's haunted soil, forever vigilant. They couldn't. Dragging them off the Mil had been a horror, skin sloughing off, flesh well-done and arms and legs twisting from the body.

They were hammered into their zinc caskets, loaded aboard the Black Tulips and never seen again. The letters to their families had been censored, like everything else. And like everything else, it was futile, ordering people to close their eyes after they'd already seen the truth, to deafen themselves after they'd already heard the music.

And she'd brushed off his hand.

_It hurts, Boris. I'm sorry. It hurts a little too much tonight._

_I don't mind just looking at you, Kápitan-_

_It hurts too much for you just to **look** at me._

“I was silly, you know.” Her voice wandered hot with the smoke into his ears. It was a peregrination that had taken much longer than either had imagined. “To just let it end like that. It was because _I_ was young and stupid.

“We were all so young, weren't we? We thought we were as old as we'd ever get. Did you ever write a letter home?”

“No. It could never say what I would want to say to my family. I didn't bother.”

“I wrote a letter. It was just one sentence. I am dead. That's all.” The smile quirked up again, dreamy with a tangled sentimentality. “Very simple. I thought my grandfather would have appreciated it. Not for duty; not for honor.

“Just because I'm dead. Because the dead take leave of those things, and then they leave the living to interpret them. The living own the dead, Boris. Just like people are owned in the memories others have of them.

“And I wonder if I've abused Menshov and Sakharov's memories. They were both good men. Little more than boys then. Both so gentle. They would give those little brats the patrol candy we were issued. You had to tell them to stop.”

“They still did it behind my back.”

“That's right. What kind of letter would I write home to their parents now? That they died valiantly collecting protection money for us? Because we've all become bandits?” It wasn't self-doubt.

The Kápitan didn't have self-doubt.

It was something quintessentially Russian. It wasn't only the _self_. It was doubt for the entire world. For the whole rotten machinery.

“We fight as well and as long as we can, Kápitan. That's all we can do. If the war changes, and if the uniforms change, we can at least hope not to change ourselves.”

“I tell myself that. Every day. The war we were supposed to fight never came, Boris. Like a coiled spring, we waited for the moment to strike. And it never came. They disarmed us. They took our weapons and told us to go home.

“Not to fight for Socialism, as we'd given our entire lives to do. But to surrender to Capitalism. To surrender, Boris. To _surrender_. I cannot do that. I will not do that.”

“Nor will I. Not as long as you will have me-”

“Mmm. I've waited to hear something like that, you know.” The cigar had begun to die, neglected in her fingers. And tossed now with a quick _flick_ , a nimble perfect elegance, beside its partner into the ashtray. “Does your sister smoke?”

“Sofiya-”

“Does she smoke?”

“Yes, but-”

“You know why I'm asking you. You told me, didn't you?” Wicked. Ferocious.

Animal.

Unfair.

War was never fair.

“That I had a body like hers. That her breasts were big like mine; that her legs were long like mine. That she was _wet_ like I am when you touch me.” And what was cruelest, what was most unfair, was that Sofiya did _nothing_ at all.

Pressed herself to him, let her chest fettered in fine burgundy fabric flatten against his, hot and merciless. Fingernails pricking at his cheek now. But nothing more. Nothing more.

“Do you have a radio, comrade?” So achingly near to him. Her breath an ambivalence in some rarefied treacly perfection that was _hers_ and the cigar's hot ash.

“Yes, I do happen to have one, comrade.”

“Amazing coincidence. I want to hear some KINO right now.” Stealing away. Settling on his mattress, a vision of fantasy anachronism. “A friend brought me to one of their concerts, you know. In 'eighty-nine. I was in Moscow.

“Where were you?”

“I went back to Ryazan for awhile, Sofiya. What did you want to hear?” He had it, of course. How could he not? Not in samizdat, of course. The actual albums.

“Mmm. The song we _should_ have had back then. Back when we knew better, and no one dared to say anything.” Of course.

That one.

A stereo sat on a low dresser; a cassette eased into its generous bulk, exactly the magnetic imperfections, the soft sighs and pops, the nearest likeness of Menshov's samizdat that anyone and anything could ever capture. A finger coiled around the volume knob, eased it up.

 _Gruppa Krovi_.

_Blood group on my sleeve..._

“That's right. That's the one.” Sofiya's long finger stabbed out at him; and now her hands splayed out over the mattress. It was desire's vision made manifest.

Countless dreams.

The moments when, well, he needed to take care of it himself. There had been other women in the interim. Few, but there were other women. Soft skinned and elegant, and lovely, but they'd been shallow imperfections; not because of them, but because of _him_. Because of what lay there, deeper than deep. The scars that tore themselves through him.

The simple _distance_. He left them with senseless explanations that never satisfied them.

_Is there someone else, then? I thought we were happy. Weren't we happy?_

There was someone else.

She sat there, lips warped in a faint little smile while Tsoi's words, poetic and dark and maudlin, rolled through them. It was another time. Another song.

Another _everything_. It still reached out with a warmth that wasn't only history's dead hand. Nothing was history, was it? Not when you still lived it.

“I never saw them live. Were they any good, Sofiya? As good as they sound on tape?”

“Better, Boris. Much better.”

“With whom?”

“A girlfriend I knew from Komsomol. She said I needed a night out.”

“I wish I'd seen them.”

“Oh, it was lovely. I barely appreciated it then. It's remarkable, isn't it? The things you only notice when enough time has passed to let you see with clear eyes?”

Yes.

It was.

Boris' smile was something subdued, also. It tugged at the steep slit that'd been ripped in a sharp crease along skin that still strained with an indelible memory.

It wasn't quite his old man's, but it was close enough.

“You don't date, do you, Boris?”

“Sofiya?”

“I don't, either. It's incredible, isn't it? The other men, they have girlfriends. Some of them have boyfriends. We're very enlightened about that, aren't we?”

“When you've lived in the dirt, those small things don't seem to matter very much.”

“But you don't. Why is that?” Was she hoping for the obvious answer?

“I think you know why, Sofiya-”

“Do I, now?” Again, that smile. It was a feint; it was a bait; it was an invitation, something irresistible. Admiring her chest's flare. The, well, the word was _tease_. Even for her. It wasn't a kitten's playfulness.

It was a fox's, eyes narrowing, framed with the satiny tufts that cradled her brow like a laurel crown. She was a conqueror. She'd earned them countless times over. Had preserved his life. And her men's. They belonged to her.

If the dead belonged to the living, and memories lived on in another's captivity, then men belonged to the officer to whom they'd sworn a loyalty that wasn't only fixed to uniforms, transient and ultimately mutable. It was indelible. Stamped with her. More than the Hammer and Sickle; more than a flag; more than a country. Those things could die.

 _Had_ died.

 _Gruppa krovi- na rukave_...

“Do I, Boris? Do I _really_? Why don't you _show_ me what I know, then? You know... You would have made an excellent officer. I never understood why a man with such an influential father, a Polkóvnik, even, one of the Airborne's _great men_ , why he would be content to be a career NCO.”

“Because I didn't want to lead, Kápitan. Because what I wanted was to fight. I didn't want to be rotated out to train other men; I didn't want to be made to sit in an office because an apparatchik had decided to attach themselves to my career.

“Because I saw my old man's regret. Every day. He loved us; loved his family. I saw my mother's, also. They were both soldiers. They would rather have been in the field, still, fighting and finally dying.”

“That's all we're good for, isn't it?” They both knew it was true. And that was enough to ease the big man to his knees.

 _Ya khotel bi' ostat'sya s toboi'_.

It didn't snap over. He'd set it to repeat; he knew that she'd wanted it. And he did, too.

His fingers reached out. She was an elusive and dazzling dream. He probably wasn't even awake. He probably had always been asleep. Maybe this wasn't anything at all. A fleeting bliss in the dazed blackness between patrols. Maybe they were still in that place of sand and dust and mountains whose ancient broken spines shattered the sky; the place where tawny dirt became Eden in strange secret valleys that men and women profaned with blood.

Where the dead still fertilized the earth. An endless unbroken cycle.

He didn't wake up, at least. Not while Sofiya's long nails grazed his palms, uplifted for her.

“Tell me why, Boris. Tell me why. Tell me why.”

“Is that an order?”

“No.” Her fine chin traced a long slow shake, left and right, and right and left. “No, it isn't. This isn't something I can order.” A shapely leg twisted; stiletto cranked to and fro. “It wouldn't be fair to either of us, would it?”

“I never got over you.”

“Mmm. And here I thought it was because of Darya-” Mischievous; still with a faint edge.

“Sofiya-”

“Young lust. It can become _love_ so quickly.”

“That kind of love was jumbled. She has a husband, anyway. And children.”

“Do you think she'd still throw herself into your arms, Boris?”

“What kind of question is that?”

“A half-serious one. Half of me felt almost aggrieved then, you know. Drunk on that shitty Uzbek wine. Aggrieved that it was such a _beautiful_ woman. A woman whose picture you carried with you. Even if you carried your father's and mother's photos with you, too.

“It pissed me off. It pissed off the competitive part of me.” Wasn't that the _whole_? “Did you know, Boris?”

“I had an idea. The way-”

“Hah. I _attacked_ you.” Her knees slipped apart, further, further, further. Slathered with tight gauzy black nylon. Warmth invited him. It would be so simple just to surrender. Or maybe it was to attack.

Wasn't that what they did?

Air Assault.

Airborne.

They took positions.

They were widow-makers, old killers for whom killing _never_ got old.

And he remembered. He remembered because it was the first of many moments together. Her lips' sudden hunger. A quicksilver flash, and her hair had barely even rustled, and her body _crashed_ against his. Her mouth flattened on Boris'; her tongue prodding, jabbing, nothing like Darya's delicacy, or the other girls he'd had.

Nothing like any other woman. He'd never been shoved on his back, twisted across the mattress, one leg thrown over his hips and then _mounted_ . Nails on his chest; fingers tugging, pulling, long suffocating kisses punctuated only with a little murmur, a groan, her jacket cast off and then his hands drifting up under the telnyashka. Hot skin. Still so achingly _fine_.

“I've gotten older, you know, Boris.”

“So have I-”

“But men get better with age, right? Like fine wine-”

“Wine rots in the bottle, Sofiya.” Her hands withdrawn. She just half-leaned back. He could still feel the wiry hard strength announcing itself through the suit's jacket, through the blouse's creamy fabric. He knew it would be.

Her belly had throbbed with strength; heavy chiseled muscularity. Her arms lean and wiry and her legs beautifully long and carved steeply and still some ineffable bit of feminine softness. The first, their first, anyway, it was raw, rutting, more a rape than anything in its violence, his belt snapped open and his afganka dragged down barely enough to admit _that_ . Not a word about him; no cooing remark on just how _lovely_ it looked.

No patience. No asking about how long he'd last; no admonition that it had better be the _best_. Just skewering herself. Heat in its sopping urgencies. An insouciance with all of it. He'd thought it was just the shitty Uzbek wine. It wasn't. Again, again, a rise and a fall, clapping her palms on his chest through the thick fabric, spine twisting in a long lunging arch.

A clench.

Shiver.

Eyes never closing, but just staring down at him like a steppe eagle.

“You're so kind, Boris.”

“You're more beautiful than you've ever been to me.” So he just said it.

“Does that mean we're both getting old?”

“It means we're both just alive.” That was it, wasn't it?

“Maybe that's what I was thinking about, watching that movie with the hedgehog in the mist. Things fall away before you even know they're gone. It's like losing something in the dark, in the fog. How can you mourn anything in this world, really?

“It's just gone. How can you have regrets? I've done so much wrong, Boris-”

“So have I.”

“You're not the Kápitan.”

“I'm her Starshii Praporshchik, aren't I?”

“Are you happy being that?”

“Always.” So his hands settled on her knees' graceful form; felt them; tasted them; adored them. Sucked down into his lungs and let pour through his blood her fine fragrance and the fragile little hiss that poured from her lips.

“That feels... Wonderful, Boris.” Swallowing. Slowly. “I regret having shoved you away from me so rudely without even an explanation.”

“It hurt you-”

“You're so sweet to lie to me like that.” It was a lie, yes. “Is that the deepest expression of someone's affection for another? Being willing to lie so brazenly about sweet things?” Maybe it was. Her thighs slipped apart with his fingers' faint tugging. She refused to fall. Swallowed him with those lucid blue eyes. “Boris... I want you, you know.

“But I need to know that you do, too.”

“Yes. For so long-”

“How timid you are for being the bravest man I've ever met.” Fingers rose up, settled on his shoulders, teased at his cheeks, drifted along his hair.

“You're even braver than I am.”

“I'm the Kápitan, after all.” She was. His lips grazed her knees; first the right, and then the left. “And you're... Oh... I feel like a Knyaginya sometimes, you know, with loyal knights. The Captain of The Guard.”

“I exist to serve.” It was almost ridiculous, wry; there was still a steel-hard conviction in it.

“I should hope so, Borya.” It speared him; a huge wriggling hot-iron lance plunged from the crown _down_. Scalding his gut; almost cauterizing him. The simple unselfconscious intimacy in it. Her voice's husky warmth. It poured through him; puddled in his ears.

This was another place.

Another time.

And yet, everything was alike. Everything was lived in that immediacy, in the present. Fundamentally, Boris was no different. There was the accumulated knowledge called the past, called experience, but it was still something wretchedly distant. Was he any different now from how he'd been at fifteen? Really? He was even _this_ height; this strength.

There wasn't the scar's sharp seam across his face.

So he kissed her again. And again. Let his mouth wander with the past's accumulated weight, because that's all people really _gained_ with age. More, and more, and more time gone, and that urgency while you tumbled down a slope with a boulder racing after you.

And eventually, you just bled into the boulder, became it. Everything crashed, tumbled, would eventually bottom out. But that didn't really matter. _Couldn't_ be allowed to matter. Not when gracefully manicured fingers were still like silk-draped iron, still clamped down on his cheeks. When her spine molded itself in a long theatrical bow.

“O-oh...” When her voice pricked up. “That's...”

Whatever it was, there was only an importuning for more.

Thighs falling apart. He caught a glimpse of something that he'd never been able to identify with her until this _instant_ . The stockings' seams biting into shapely thighs that were softer than they'd been, and not _soft_. They hadn't melted into fat. There was only the most achingly lovely kiss. He'd seen her, of course, training with the other men.

The endless grinding exercise. The ritual ablutions in sweat. Clopping around the gym they'd installed in the basement. Or racing through the sultry sea air wafting from the shore. There was a pool; he'd never dared to torment himself with the spectacle of her, even in an essentially sexless diving suit, weighted with a pack.

High heels stabbed at the floor.

Her skin was softer than he'd ever imagined. Than he remembered.

“You don't think it's unseemly, do you, Borya?”

“What-”

“That I've grown so _fat_ with age-”

“This isn't fat, Sofiya. It's soft _er_ ; not soft. Your skin is even lovelier than I remember.” It wasn't possible to deafen himself to the quiet little sigh from her lips. Relief, wasn't it? She said nothing at all. Just let him push apart her thighs further, and further, and further.

Her panties were the suit's hue, a deep and rich ruby that had darkened like a rarefied gem with a heavy point of damp heat. The scent was something clean, achingly feminine, pouring from her without compunction. Honeyed on his nostrils.

Dragging a long deep gasp of it.

“You sound like a wild animal, you know.” Laughter; that laughter. How often had he felt it? Pulled into that lush dark place, smothered with her, ordered to drink like a parched horse at a stream, and how could he refuse? There was no impatience now.

It had been almost ten years. Would another few seconds kill either of them?

The napalm's scars scribed strange deep furrows and rifts in the flesh; an outstretched finger closed the years' void. It wasn't too painful now, was it?

Did it still hurt too much?

He waited; he could only wait.

“You shouldn't be so shy, you know.” Even while her eyes boiled. While her breath was perfectly still.

“No? It doesn't hurt?”

“Not at all.” How could there be restraint _now_? So there wasn't. Thighs prised apart; heaved onto his shoulders, savoring the achingly graceful twist and tremor, outstretched while the skirt surrendered to his hands, hiked up, and up, and up 'til the tight pencil hem was little more than a furrowed band around her hips.

The panties had almost blackened; there wasn't any impatience, no, but only the fingers' simple will to graze. Tease. Caress. Know again those shapes that still haunted dreams, still could stain his sheets like a fifteen-year-old's.

“Borya, that's... So nice. _Very nice_. You know just how to touch me.” Stroking up, down, languid meanders _around_ the heat that strained out, fashioned a near-black seam across the fabric. Tormented her, easing under the skirt's band and swiping at her belly's tensing strength.

The scars wandered with a sense of the jellied fuel's savage randomness. It would have been poetic to say that it was one of the imperfections that sets the deeper perfections into a lovelier relief. But they weren't imperfections at all. Like the metal that still lay in her body; like the rock; like the shallower scars and creases and the calluses, _those_ were divine.

They were glorious.

“You're so lovely, Sofiya. Sofiya.” Nuzzling with cheeks whose charcoal stubble rasped on the stockings' fabric already becoming lucent with sweat. The room was too fucking hot. It was perfect. It wasn't quite the stuffy stagnant stillness in her barrack, but it was _enough_. It was enough. Because this wasn't that instant, either, was it?

Kissing her now; thighs adored, lingered on, mouth hungry. Teeth bared and _snapping_ at the flesh's luscious depth in meat and strength and, yes, that sumptuous sleek tight youthful fat.

“Ngn... You're... Did anyone ever tell you how much you look like a wild animal, Borya?”

“Only you, Sofiya.” That was enough. Gnawing at her; worrying at the left thigh. Sliding up, and up, and up, his fingers cradling succulent skin. One of the heels batted at his shoulder with a quick sharp spasm. They were heated with the room, with her skin, and still _icy_ against him.

Leather groaned; kissed him with its warm aroma.

“Oh, oh, that's...” Words had melted down.

What could they say? Jabber about the vagaries like children? Because this wasn't something unfamiliar now; didn't merit a whisper about every tiny little quirk.

And he still craved it with youth's novelty. Maybe even more now. Knowing his shorts' strain, about a second from just ripping through the fabric that wasn't only tight but strangulating.

Needed it. Needed _her_. His hands busied with her knees, tracing languid whirls over her calves, up and down and sending huge shivers rippling in hot wavelets through her. Her fingers worked endlessly, also, plucking at his skin, his cheeks, savoring and tasting everything that she'd just tossed away, or... Or rather, that she'd denied herself, flung away from herself, years before.

She could have regretted it.

She chose not to bother. Why worry about what had been lost in the mists? Why not rejoice that it had been found again? How often did that happen?

Almost never.

And it finally settled there. Between her legs. That heat reaching out, racing up, while his lips finally savored those graceful shapes. Velvet geometry; an inkling of his own warm breath reflected, uplifted with her. Teasing and darting around the lush soft flesh.

Silence but for a prolonged shocking breath from her chest.

A distant _ah..._

And now a kiss. One deliberate, patient, _slow_ ; mouth wreathing her, a pressure and a presence settling more, more, more. Firmer and more intense. And he finally tasted it. After eternity layered on eternity. The fabric's crisp and neutral essence, and then _her_. The sodden sweetness in a woman's body.

No.

 _Her_ body.

“A-ah, that's... Very...” Words, words, words, what helpless and worthless things. A long gasp stained with madness' red-eyed toothless scream. Her eyes had abandoned purchase on sight, and they flared open again. A hue like cornflower; a softness like velvet and titanium, also.

Tongue swiped, once, and twice, again and again. Slipped out to _prod_ ; jab; to caress her. Elusive and flitting away before anything sure could be had. That was their essence, wasn't it? Fighting like the dushman. A quick attack and then springing away.

“You aren't fair, Borya-”

“You taught me too well, Sofiya.” Simple truth.

“There are times when you need to make a frontal attack-”

“Oh, I know, Sofiya.” So there was. Fingers hooked into the fabric; a quick _pull_ and the panties hadn't vanished but were just slipped lower, lower, her thighs snapped around his neck, legs twisting and undulating to admit their passage. And they were gone.

And she was there.

The word, well, it was resplendent. That was the only one. A medieval sublimity; a beauty that was ageless, tireless, unfailing and undying. Yes. He could be romantic, couldn't he? He could feel that warm misty sentimentalism, couldn't he? Because they had been young once. In the dust and the squalor and the blood and despair and the hopelessness, doubting and fearing and knowing that all their desires meant nothing, they were still young.

A man and a woman in sky-blue berets.

She smiled at him. A sincere one. Unbroken with hate and without menace's cold urgent economy. Slowly, it poured over her lips; slowly, the vanity and the anxiety, also, that wasn't a soldier's but just a woman's. His was a man's.

“You let it grow. Your hair.” Even there. A thick tightly-knotted crop cresting her, a few grades darker than her thick blonde hair.

“Ngn... It was just easier to shave it off then. Why? Do you go for that look, Boris? That little-girl look all the women seem to have nowadays.”

“Only if you do.” A kiss. Finally. The strange and twisting and perpendicular. Dipping down and delighting himself, delighting _her_ , with a taste. A quick kiss like a butterfly's wings in their deft flitting beat. Her eyes had become wet and febrile; there weren't tears, but only that quivering mistiness that was lust's candor. Hands came to rest on his scalp; thighs tensed and squeezed now with a merciless grasp around his cheeks.

There wasn't to be gentleness now.

“Don't _tease_ me, Borya. Don't you dare tease me right now. Do you know how long it's been since I've felt your lips?”

“Too long.” His murmur vanished, melted into that dark place, and what did it matter, anyway? Not diving but just falling, falling, those moments when the lamp would flash a hard malachite on their faces and the world would become a roaring confusion while the doors strained open, slowly with an ineluctable mechanistic will.

He would never close his eyes. Other men did in training, because the drogue line was as inflexible and sure as the Party's will. But Sofiya never closed her eyes, either. They had a few training jumps with one another before the Airborne became the Air Assault and the helicopter denied them their surrogate and fallible wings. She smiled over the cabin in the thundering Ilyushin. Wind whipped and tore a them.

Never laughter. Never fear, either. Just the cold reality in plunging into space, suddenly helpless while the fat-bodied transport trundled off, the last stick away and that great groaning whale already popping flares in a huge sizzling pyrotechnic show.

And he was drifting now. In the dark with her. It was a strange wheeling dance, waiting for the earth to rear up, for the hard _crack_ on the soil that was just a controlled crash. He hoped he never landed.

Kissing. Kissing. Slowly, slowly, his lips and finally gorging himself with a controlled frenzy with his tongue. Large, sprawling, flattening across her. Dragged with an achingly deliciously cruel patience up, up, _up_ , almost fugitive from those soft plump lips that splayed out to greet him, to invite him. A graze over a swollen point that felt like nothing more than a rarefied pearl. A _whimper_.

Everything whorled around him, textureless and undefined. It wasn't battle; wasn't war; wasn't anything but just what it was. Their heat conjoined, mashed together.

“Y-you still... Remember... Still know how to... Ah...” Meaningless yammering nothings gushed from lips drawn into a tight snarl that his eyes would never have seen and still _knew_. Because on those lazy afternoons or torchlit evenings or drowsy mornings, she'd sit there, twisting back a bit but still with eyes transfixing him and she'd rock and pivot into his mouth, let him lap at her like a puppy.

“How... It's...” Never _too_ intensely on that point; always teasing and swirling around it. Always tormenting. And finally splitting her open with the tongue's quick lunge.

“Fuck!” Exactly as it was craved. Precisely according to order.

There was no order in this, of course. Nothing in its hard absolute geometries, its geographies that could be charted on one of their relief maps, puzzling over the indistinguishable peaks, the simple weirdness in _this_ valley being no different from any other but the sure knowledge that the Mil had dumped them _there_ , its corpulent bulk relieved of its burden and smoothly jerking up off the ragged mountain.

This was an elemental joy in ignorance. In not knowing because knowledge would have destroyed everything, would have relieved them of the childlike bliss in tasting those bits of discovery. A new quirk; another soft coo from Sofiya's lips.

A large finger, too large, too large when a second joined it, eyes narrowing and then snapping open again, brushed there; wriggling, writhing, laced gracefully into her, pitching up, nails oh so serendipitously trimmed.

“There, there, there, there, there.” What _there_ was didn't exactly command an Olympian imagination. A shudder, hips levitating with his fingers' slow stir; a protean hot formlessness taking shape, crunching and grinding around them.

A _snarl_.

“You're- that's _much..._ Much too...” And words died. He could feel it rush through her; he could _taste_ it on his ears, hear it on his tongue. A swipe and snap and it was _too_ much. Knew it in the buck, the squirming thrash left, and then right. Thighs _blinding_ him, hips pushing.

“Y-you're... Do you know how long it's been since I've felt that, Borya?” Surrender was something that _happened_ with his Kápitan. So he quiesced. The natural order, wasn't it? Smeared and adorned with her. Syrupy droplets had gathered on his left cheek; a heavy slick wormed itself up over his brow.

It followed his scar's ferocious ridge.

“Look at you, Starshii Praporshchik. You're all _messy_. That's no way for a soldier to look, is it?”

“Apologies for failing to live up to the Airborne's grooming standards, Kápitan.” A smile; an earnest one. Laughter. Hers unsteady, drunk not with anything as banal as liquor but this moment. This instant in time away from time while KINO throbbed its heavy synthesized beat through the stereo, while Tsoi's reedy and strange and beautiful voice tolled out.

“Come here. Let me clean you up. It's my job, after all.” Dragged up, and up, his legs the strength that her slackened arms needed, offered without a plea and without a command and without a word. Arching to greet her mouth with his.

Slowly, slowly, a kiss that wandered over his jaw's crags, his cheeks' roughness.

“Not even _shaving_ for your Kápitan. It's very disrespectful.”

“I'll make sure to make a formal apology-”

“Oh, it's too late for that. Much too late.” Hands on his shoulders. “I should really send you to the disbat.”

“Kápitan-”

“But, well, you've been a reliable staff NCO to me. How could I do that to you because of this... This little lapse?” Fingernails _raked_ along his shoulders. “I know it's not very professional for me, but why not a little dedovshchina?”

“Kápitan-”

“Ngn... Sofiya now, Borya. Sofiya. Let me tell you your punishment.” Kissing, kissing, immaculate teeth a savage _snap_ on his throat. She wandered, browsed like a fawn with a wolf's jaws. “Are you afraid?”

“Never, Sofiya. Never-”

“Good. You shouldn't be afraid of a little discipline.” The nails were steel harder than his Kalashnikov's slab-sided grace. Tore into him; flayed off faint little morsels of flesh with a scrawling strange prickle. “Stand up, Starshii Praporshchik. Stand up to be inspected.”

What a hypocrite he was, almost _trembling_ with the ordeal in denying him her lips.

And he still did. Firmly at attention.

“My, _my_ , Borya. Has _this_ thing grown? It was _well_ beyond regulation length before, but I think it might be even _bigger_ now.” Swollen, obscene, a depraved hungry shadow like a primeval beast straining ghostly against the fabric. Her nails were a strange trembling tingle; brushed slowly, slowly, a wicked tease.

Her aroma wreathed him, sweet and hot and with an intensity that was almost musk. Delirium.

“I think it might be well past regulation length. Maybe I should trim it.” And another terrible delectable _rake_ down it.

“Sofiya-”

“Oh, listen to _that_.” He'd heard it, also. A tremor in his voice like a schoolboy's. “Are you afraid? Let me guess... You haven't been taking care of this as often as you should.”

“Very rarely, Sofiya-”

“I confess that I haven't exactly been very attentive to it, either.” A kiss. A kiss. Dipping down to cradle its swollen hungering shape with her lips.

“Sofiya... It's...”

“So soon?” Would it be? Was it mortifying, or just a tribute to _exactly_ how much he'd neglected it? “It's all right. Something _this_ large must be as high-maintenance as a tank. As a bumblebee.” Tongue flitting out, soft and as pink as her nails in the warm light that minced and twinkled and shivered through her hair. “You may put your hands on my hair.

“Touch me. Touch me, Borya.”

Yes.

How could he reject _that_? How could he not just gorge himself on her hair's fragrant sensuality, the succulent shapes that could never have fallen from memory? The jawline's fine cut and her cheeks' softness.

Softer than memory supplied.

“Here we are.” And the shorts were just dragged down. A _gasp_ ; soft chortling from her lips when the monstrous thing was finally freed to spring up, slap at her jaw. “Look at this!” Cradled in a hand; clasped between Sofiya's palm in its lavish heat and her cheek's ruddy satin, an immaculate sleek skein with a tasteful kiss of makeup without vanity.

“It feels so _hot_ , Borya. So hot.” Nuzzled; a vulpine grace, teasing, tormenting. And finally a tongue flitting out, just once, dainty and quick and _snapping_ at the peak, bloated and blunt and achingly coarse and still somehow uplifted in a reflected beauty from her. “So delicious. Your skin.

“I haven't kissed your skin like this for too long, I think. We _really_ need to deal with this discipline problem, don't we?”

“Yes, Sofiya. Yes.”

“I wonder if you can regain a gag reflex.” _That_ was nearly enough to obviate any need to learn. A quick spasm; a pulse.

Dragged between her lips, borne aloft on fingers elegantly steepled under him. Slowly, slowly, sinking into that dreamy heat. Shapeless grace cohered around him; tongue a quick hammering 'til he passed it wholly, falling deeper, deeper, deeper.

A wet _gasp_ when it grazed her throat.

And falling more, and more, and more. Eyes straining indigo in the dark, welling with tears that definitely weren't sorrow.

And wheezing; a tormented little choke.

It was enough.

 _Too_ much. Not even to the root and it was too fucking much. Feeling his fingers strain with a discipline that was harder than just _iron_ . Harder than _he_ was. A will to just hammer it into her, pound it into her mouth until every drop had been wrenched up like a pump heaved into a virgin well.

But no.

No.

Trembling against her mouth while long kneading caresses suckled, dragged, tugged, tormented; fingers laced around the two inches or so that _couldn't_ be pulled into that paradisaical place and wringing, clutching, clenching. The universe didn't so much explode as _implode_ ; melting down, concentrating, casting itself in endlessly mutable arabesques that formed and broke and formed again.

White-hot behind his eyes. Jaw clenching and a scalding spike driven through his ears.

Sighted blindness; transfixed with her while she just pulled, pulled, a scalding tension, suckling and sucking and squelching and sputtering and finally, finally, dragging it away while its huge bloated bulk never slackened and never lapsed, one last rheumy thread tethering sternly-cinched lips to its obscene peak, lacquered in cum's coppery froth churned with spit.

It sagged under its own bulk; finally _snapped_ , a long pallid strand adorning a mountainous creamy breast swollen with breath.

It was more than enough to send every morsel of blood ricocheting back, if it had left at all.

And then lips slipped open, slowly, slowly, head craned back to cradle a cauldron of velvety thick juices in her mouth. A tongue's pink stripe was some exotic dolphin's dorsal fin cresting the froth; stirring, twisting, wheeling and falling down and spearing up through it again. Breath shuddered through it.

And then it vanished. Gravity suddenly noticed or at least just admitted, crashing through her throat, settling in her belly.

“Oh, I'm _very_ glad I didn't have dessert tonight, Borya. That was _more_ than enough. So _intense_. Like drinking the cheffir those kids at the base made. It's so thick; it's so _hot_. You _really_ haven't been taking care of yourself, have you?

“Why not?”

“I can only think of you, and you weren't there.” It was an idiot candor, drooling through that misty orgasmic haze.

“Well, this could be a disciplinary problem. We can't have that, can we? Oh. Look at that.” A pearl had clotted on her lip, snapped up with her tongue's deft flit. “You're even a little sweet. At least we know there's nothing wrong with your diet.” A smile crooked enough to meet itself walking around a corner was a delirious punctuation.

“Would you care to help me with my clothes?” Standing. Rising to her fullest height, chest heaving up, paradoxically weightless and profoundly _heavy_ , trembling and plump and almost gelid. His fingers already had traced those contours in the imagination's dark delirium.

He'd felt it, of course.

The suit's coarse fabric.

The blouse's creamy soft allure.

It still was nothing beside the reality. The jacket shrugged off; not tossed so much as just forgotten. Vanishing somewhere less than meaningless. The blouse unfastened with an achingly patient ease, button after button after button in a protracted seam like the planet's longest and most glamorous minefield, fine pearl motes demanding to be plucked out gracefully.

The reward was what it could only be.

They were larger than they had been. Sofiya's bra was little more than a glorified shelf; succulent pink nipples, thick and firm and proud, elegantly upturned, announced themselves with perfect unselfconscious candor.

Why should there be shame at all?

“Sonya.” That was something he hadn't ever allowed himself in the past years. Stealing out of his lips. Perfidious. Glorious.

And she lay back, tossing the skirt that she couldn't even _wait_ to let him slip off. Everything but for the sweat-streaked stockings, patchwork columns of a stark black and gauzy gray whispering of the alabaster skin traced with scars that bewitched him.

She'd become more beautiful. Lovelier still. It wasn't girlish timidity; wasn't shame; arms twisted through the brilliant halo that wreathed her. A pinup elegance with lips pursed and eyes a bit dazed and drunk with desire.

Heels rasping at the bed.

“Are you just going to stare? Ever imagine me dressed like this, Borya?”

“More than once.” The mattress dimpled under his knee; the bed serenaded with a slow groan, a soft little bedspring squeak.

“Really? Isn't _that_ decadent and counterrevolutionary, all of this Capitalist ostentation?”

“We're all entitled to our own little hypocrisies, aren't we?”

“Of course. Come here. Come here. You don't need anything. I'm no less barren than I was before. A gift from the Motherland. The gift of the atom.” There was no woe in it; no maternal instinct to mourn it.

They had been as barren as the fields seeded still with mines, with the iridescent bomblets kicked out of the huge voluptuous tubes that tumbled from the Sukhois, flat and stark and snapping open, sewing the earth with death.

Both of them.

“Come here, Borya.”

“Of course.” Closer, and closer, and closer. Her mouth ate; her body, also. And his. Twisting together. Fingers laced into tight knots; his strength and hers. Hands ground into the thick mattress; his knees' whisper against hers, long legs arcing slowly, patiently around his hips. Heels gouged into muscle so thick, skin so _firm_ , that it became a delicious ordeal.

He fell.

She rose to greet him. Hips' lurch and a brush, once, twice, awkward with his bulk. With her simple sleek sweetness, sopping and almost greasy against him. Twisting, tangling, finally chancing a glance between them. Lids had slumped down; her lashes in their inky negative sunburst trembled on her cheeks.

“You... It's quite the... The... Technique, Borya, bringing me off without even putting it in yet-”

“Should I say I'm sorry?”

“You should just _put it in me_. I want it. I've been waiting _years_ for this. For that big hard thing. Stick it in me like a goddamned _bayonet_. Don't be gentle with me. We have plenty of time for gentleness _later_.” _Gruppa Krovi- na rukave... Ne ostat'sya v etoi trave..._

Jumbled, meaningless.

Everything lost meaning. Sounds without words. Senseless beautiful poetry.

All of it. All of it. The world outside that room. Everything could have evaporated into nothing, and it wouldn't have fucking _mattered_. Finally, finally, the hips' quirk and her belly's muscular ripple and it was there.

Planted between lips that sucked him deeper, deeper, deeper, the huge man _straining_ apart a boundary like an elephant thundering through an apartment's doorway. Her eyes enormous; a wince; jaws clenching and a whimper from her lips.

“It's so fucking _huge_ , Borya. That's...” Even after his fingers, the only reflection was from Darya. That first. “If I cry, I'll take it out on your hide a thousand-fold.” No tears; there were never tears, of course. Even when the hungry fire, a livid and relentless and ravenous beast, squirming and grasping and gnawing and gnashing and _eating_ , had taken her, there were no tears. He'd never seen them. They could only laugh now; laugh the cold laugh of those that even Death had forgotten. But there was still a simple and beautiful joy in it.

“I look forward to it, Sonya. Sonya. Sonya.” Adoring her with every word; every word became _her_. Daggering deep, deeper still; ground against something that whispered of another pair of lips, a strange rippling barrier, an obstacle to fulfilling the weird twisting phantasms that curdled on their breath.

_It feels like you're in my **belly** , Borya. You **must** have gotten bigger._

Maybe he had.

A madness in that wet heat coiled serpentine around him; falling to the root and then twisting it out, lips lush and raw and dragged over him. Her head thrown back, straining at the inconvenient bedding. Hips ground on his; belly twisted against the telnyashka darkening to gray with sweat, his and hers; spine arching with an athleticism that didn't only whisper but _roared_ a strength that could probably shatter stone between her muscles, grind it into fine desert dust. Her legs' clenching frenzy.

And still, still, nails dragged down his shoulders, along his neck, not only tracing again with a long-remembered familiarity but discovery's delicious novelty; ripping through skin, raising ferocious raw ridges. Tasting them with her fingers' pads in a delicate self-satisfaction; daubing at the blood, smearing it in wheeling abstract expressionism across his cheeks, along his throat.

Language had fallen away.

Been forgotten but for one word for each.

_Borya, Borya..._

_Sonya._

Yes.

A perfected symmetry. Lurching, pounding, pummeling, dragged deep and rising and slamming down again; a wet thunder. Sweat bled into eyes, warped the universe into unknowable and almost thought-defying smears of muddled shapes never denuded of meaning.

Her scars flexed, twisted; his, also; thoughts coalesced, mutual fervor.

 _Beautiful_.

His and hers.

And orgasm sure as hell wasn't meaningless. But there wasn't the urgent rush, the obsessive, _Oh, did you?_ Or _Well, it's coming... So..._

It came.

Never fled.

More and more and more, just piled like brass around a Kalashnikov, hot and weeping a delirious and fragrant madness; gathered like ravens in a roosting impatient parliament, cawing and begging for more, and more, and more; a sublimity, a circle, sprawling off into the infinite, creation and consumption and creation anew.

Rising.

And rising.

And rising.

 _He_ felt it. The strange and delectable sense of even the tiniest most achingly elusive empathy with a woman's luxury, to gorge yourself on every new spattering sizzling thunderbolt howling through the body. It shivered; an incendiary certainty that wouldn't just bleed off but... Dimmed, dipped, layered itself on him, another bit of bulk straining against her. And another orgasmic eternity rending her every nerve.

Heels were regretted; just a bit. Toes clenched, wished for nothing but to curl, whatever the simple bliss in teasing and tearing into him with what felt more like spurs; he was heavy, but her strength was more than enough to cope; sweat poured over them, slicked her hair to her cheeks, melted the buoyant lush vastness into a thin matted smear across her.

She shone gold.

And he did with a diabolic light in the dark. A smile where there was not even a scowl but an impassive _nothing_. She hadn't seen him smile that smile for, well... For a single day since she'd tossed out that one, also.

Reclaimed in the mist. The scars weren't unnoticed. A hand fell between them, traced them, adored them, and there wasn't the _ache_ anymore. The ugly sense of revulsion; the failure; the hopeless helpless _nothing_.

Arms wound around her. Her arms twisted around mountainous shoulders.

Rising, and rising, and rising.

_Ya nikomu ne khochu stavit' nogu na grud'... Ya khotel bi ostat'sya s toboi'... Prosto ostat'sya s toboi'... No visokaya v nebe zvezda zovet menya v put'._

No stars called. They'd died, faded, dissolved into dust through the infinite.

They felt it, too.

The total silence.

The grave.

It didn't matter at all.

It came; not with anticlimax, and not with the thunder that announced this had no other meaning _but_ the body's visceral idiot desires.

It just was. Swelling up; her eyes enormous, a nod's quick jerk, encouraging, pleading, _commanding_.

This was the moment.

Flaring. Protesting against the heavy hot grasp clutching and kneading in its sinuous ripples, a strength that threatened him with something that would give her even _more_ than she'd expected, than she'd wanted.

It didn't pour.

 _Exploded_ . Huge splashing gouts roaring and racing and straining out; swollen around him, _crushed_ from her like a wine press, heavy syrupy strands dribbling along her ass' shapely lush roundness. And stillness; not his will but _hers_ , bearing down, a faint little whisper from her lips.

_It was too much, much too much, an eternity ago._

“O-oh-”

“What? Did you think I've been living it up, Starshii Praporshchik?”

“I didn't know-”

“But you thought enough to be _jealous_.”

“Yes.” It was almost laughable, wasn't it?

“As if I've ever had the _time_ for it. No. No. I've had my own fingers and those... Those memories everyone always tries to keep on a pedestal, far away from their hands, like a precious statue; a work of art. Your hands are greasy, will ruin them, won't they, if they touch them?

“So you do it as little as you can. What about you?”

“The same.” And it was true.

“Memories of whom?”

“Do you need to ask?”

“I still am.” A kiss. Again, again, denying words in a communion whose understanding struck deeper than any fallible language.

“You. Of course.”

“Of course. Anything else would be disloyal.” He was nothing if not loyal, after all. Lips were bruised. She'd carved long throbbing creases down his shoulders, torn into his neck, reduced his back to ribbons even _through_ the telnyashka.

“A-again, Borya?” And it flared, of course. Swelled, pricked up and shrugged off what little torpor had kissed it. “I think... We should maybe give _me_ a chance to rest.”

“Sonya-”

“It hurts, you know, when you haven't had it for a _very_ long time. Like that first night together. I thought I was on fire. It was wonderful. And deeply ironic, isn't it?” The laughter was bitterly jubilant. “Just give me a bit of rest, Borya.

“And we have all the time in the world, right?”

It was one of those beautiful lies that adoration wrought.

For both of them.

Fingers converged again.

Skin lacquered with cooling sweat knotted in the heat.

Her eyes had become drowsy, hadn't they, a vulpine grace that eased lashes down, and down, and down, 'til they came to rest on still-flushed cheeks. So he kissed them; kissed her lips.

Ultimately, slowly, flesh slackened, slipped from her; legs sagged away; eased onto his back, with Sofiya dragged across him. The bedding was meaningless in the warmth that they invited, adored, luxuriated in while the music and the dim amber light sloshed across them. They weren't there.

No.

They were still drifting, somewhere in space, wheeling under the canopy, alone but falling together, conscious of the communion between them. The obligations and the responsibilities as weightless as they.

“Do you think death forgot us, Borya?” An eye little more than a cold azure seam, a quality like the beret they both adored, they'd coveted and earned and had snatched from them.

He didn't know, and so said nothing.

“There are times when I feel happy to think it might have. To go on forever like this, even if we're just the living dead. But what living meant before, it's deserted us. Would it have been better to go like so many of the men and women we knew?

“We told ourselves they were the best, that they shouldn't have been taken before their time, but was that the truth at all? Didn't we all envy them? The conscripts, of course they didn't want to die. That was not their war.

“It wasn't our war, either. But it was our fight, because we wanted to fight. We wanted to _feel_ it. And it's gone now. The country that gave us that ardor, that we gave our youth to, it no longer even exists. All its ideals have been buried and forgotten in so few years, as if they never had existed.

“I still think about it sometimes. No. I think about it all the time. About flying over Afghanistan, that great meaningless wasteland, looking at the dead rock and the beautiful green valleys. In Nuristan, the terraces that soared up into the sky.

“Would that have been a better grave for us? If we'd just had one last jump, learned to fly for even a little while without our parachutes? Are they all happier? The ones we've already left, whose memories we tend? It really isn't fair, is it?

“The way they push that burden on us while they have the ease in just leaving? But I was always happy you lived, Borya. I was always deeply happy that I never needed to keep you like that, a living ghost of a memory.

“I never told you that, I'm sure.”

“You had no need-”

“ _I_ want to tell you; _I_ wanted to tell you.” Sofiya's hands seeking his; grasping at his. A tormented wince flitting through her. “I did.”

“I was always happy that you never left, Sofiya.” It would have been so facile to say _us_. But it wasn't true.

“It would have been so easy for us. It still is. I still wonder about it. If maybe we lost the best and worthiest moments in our lives.”

“We're still alive.”

“Yes, we are, aren't we?” Huddled against his chest. A long swallow twisted her throat against his skin through the thick fabric.

_No visokaya v nebe zvezda zovet menya v put'._

They would fall eventually.

He knew it.

And she, also.

Ultimately, the stars dead in the empty sky, their time gone, they would land.

Together or apart.

Regretful or joyous.

They would land.

It was all just a journey, wasn't it?

A march through the fog.

 


End file.
